Ion beam fabrication of an antifouling Pluronic F-108 thin film-based microwell bioplatform for highly resolved cell microarrays

Abstract Cell microarray bioplatform have been widely developed for fundamental and advanced biomedical research. However, it is still difficult to achieve site-specific adhesion due to the weak cell repellency of the background regions. Here, a microwell bioplatform with a strong cell-repellent background was newly developed by a sequential ion beam irradiation-induced anchoring and re-irradiation-induced erosion microstructuring of PF-108 thin film on a tissue culture polystyrene (TCPS) substrate. The newly developed bioplatform possesses outstanding optical transparency and well-defined microwells in a variety of sizes and shapes. Its microwells also show cell-adhesiveness (as much as that on the TCPS) with excellent cell-repellency (no cell growth) on the anchored PF-108 film background. As a result, the live-cell culturing of different strains on the developed bioplatform produced two highly resolved cell microarrays (possessing the diverse sizes and shapes corresponding to those of the bioplatform) with a non-specific adhesion-free background. Moreover, different whole-slide GFP and dsRED protein expressions without a non-specific binding background were successfully achieved in the cell microarray. Noticeably, our finding demonstrates that this toxic chemical-free and biocompatible strategy using ion beam-induced solid-state microstructuring provides a non-specific binding-free microwell bioplatform for use in a highly resolved cell microarray for the practical gene expression assay.