  A detailed understanding of the interface between living cells and substrate
materials is of rising importance in many fields of medicine, biology and
biotechnology. Cells at interfaces often form epithelia. The physical barrier
that they form is one of their main functions. It is governed by the properties
of the networks forming the cytoskeleton systems and by cell-to-cell contacts.
Different substrates with varying surface properties modify the migration
velocity of the cells. On the one hand one can change the materials
composition. Organic and inorganic materials induce differing migration
velocities in the same cell system. Within the same class of materials, a
change of the surface stiffness or of the surface energy modifies the migration
velocity, too. For our cell adhesion studies a variety of different,
homogeneous substrates were used (polymers, bio-polymers, metals, oxides). In
addition, an effective lithographic method, Polymer Blend Lithography (PBL), is
reported, to produce patterned Self-Assembled Monolayers (SAM) on solid
substrates featuring two or three different chemical functionalities. This we
achieve without the use of conventional lithography like e-beam or UV
lithography, only by using self-organization. These surfaces are decorated with
a Teflon-like and with an amino-functionalized molecular layer. The resulting
pattern is a copy of a previously created self-organized polymer pattern,
featuring a scalable lateral domain size in the sub-micron range down below 100
nanometers. The resulting monolayer pattern features a high chemical and
biofunctional contrast with feature sizes in the range of cell adhesion
complexes like e.g. focal adhesion points.
