Artificial Intelligence Aided Design of Microtextured Surfaces: Application to Controlling Wettability.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a powerful set of tools for engineering innovative materials. However, the AI-aided design of materials textures has not yet been researched in depth. In order to explore the potentials of AI for discovering innovative biointerfaces and engineering materials surfaces, especially for biomedical applications, this study focuses on the control of wettability through design-controlled hierarchical surfaces, whose design is supported and its performance predicted thanks to adequately structured and trained artificial neural networks (ANN). The authors explain the creation of a comprehensive library of microtextured surfaces with well-known wettability properties. Such a library is processed and employed for the generation and training of artificial neural networks, which can predict the actual wetting performance of new design biointerfaces. The present research demonstrates that AI can importantly support the engineering of innovative hierarchical or multiscale surfaces when complex-to-model properties and phenomena, such as wettability and wetting, are involved.

Soft-Lithography of Polyacrylamide Hydrogels Using Microstructured Templates: Towards Controlled Cell Populations on Biointerfaces.

Polyacrylamide hydrogels are interesting materials for studying cells and cell-material interactions, thanks to the possibility of precisely adjusting their stiffness, shear modulus and porosity during synthesis, and to the feasibility of processing and manufacturing them towards structures and devices with controlled morphology and topography. In this study a novel approach, related to the processing of polyacrylamide hydrogels using soft-lithography and employing microstructured templates, is presented. The main novelty relies on the design and manufacturing processes used for achieving the microstructured templates, which are transferred by soft-lithography, with remarkable level of detail, to the polyacrylamide hydrogels. The conceived process is demonstrated by patterning polyacrylamide substrates with a set of vascular-like and parenchymal-like textures, for controlling cell populations. Final culture of amoeboid cells, whose dynamics is affected by the polyacrylamide patterns, provides a preliminary validation of the described strategy and helps to discuss its potentials.

Synergies between Surface Microstructuring and Molecular Nanopatterning for Controlling Cell Populations on Polymeric Biointerfaces.

Polymeric biointerfaces are already being used extensively in a wide set of biomedical devices and systems. The possibility of controlling cell populations on biointerfaces may be essential for connecting biological systems to synthetic materials and for researching relevant interactions between life and matter. In this study, we present and analyze synergies between an innovative approach for surface microstructuring and a molecular nanopatterning procedure of recent development. The combined set of techniques used may be instrumental for the development of a new generation of functional polymeric biointerfaces. Eukaryotic cell cultures placed upon the biointerfaces developed, both before and after molecular patterning, help to validate the proposal and to discuss the synergies between the surface microstructuring and molecular nanopatterning techniques described in the study. Their potential role in the production of versatile polymeric biointerfaces for lab- and organ-on-a-chip biodevices and towards more complex and biomimetic co-culture systems and cell cultivation set-ups are also examined.