Peptide-Functionalized Nanostructured Microarchitectures Enable Rapid Mechanotransductive Differentiation

Microenvironmental factors play critical roles in regulating stem cell fate, providing a rationale to engineer biomimetic microenvironments that facilitate rapid and effective stem cell differentiation. Three-dimensional (3D) hierarchical microarchitectures have been developed to enable rapid neural differentiation of multipotent human mesenchymal stromal cells (HMSCs) via mechanotransduction. However, low cell viability during long-term culture and poor cell recovery efficiency from the architectures was also observed in this system. Such problems hinder the further applications of the architectures in stem cell differentiation. Here, we present a new family of 3D nanostructured microarchitectures functionalized with cell adhesion-promoting RGD peptides. These RGD-functionalized architectures significantly upregulated long-term cell viability, facilitated effective recovery of differentiated cells from the architectures while maintaining high differentiation efficiency. Effective recovery of highly viabl...