Facile Fabrication of High-Definition Hierarchical Wrinkle Structures for Investigating the Geometry-Sensitive Fate Commitment of Human Neural Stem Cells

As neural stem cells (NSCs) interact with biophysical cues from their niche during development, it is important to understand the biomolecular mechanism of how the NSCs process these biophysical cues to regulate their behaviors. In particular, anisotropic geometric cues in micro-/nanoscale have been utilized to investigate the biophysical effect of the structure on NSCs behaviors. Here, a series of new nanoscale anisotropic wrinkle structures with the a range of wavelength scales (from 50 nm to 37 μm) was developed to demonstrate the effect of the anisotropic nanostructure on the fate commitment of NSCs. Intriguingly, two distinct characteristic length scales promoted the neurogenesis. Each wavelength scale showed a striking variation in terms of dependency on the directionality of the structures, suggesting the existence of at least two different ways in the processing of anisotropic geometries for neurogenesis. Furthermore, the combined effect of the two distinctive length scales was observed by employi...