Extending Capillary Assembly to Biological Systems Selective Docking of Cells

8 Extending Capillary Assembly to Biological Systems Selective Docking of Cells 

To study the response of a large population of cells at the individual cell level, many efforts have been dedicated to the development of parallel and simple methods to localize precisely individual cells on a surface or create assemblies. It has been recently demonstrate that capillary assembly can be adapted to biological objects to create cells arrays. 

The first example of the application of capillary assembly to biology was reported by Ressier et al Escherichia coli ( coU) bacteria in aqueous suspensions were successfully assembly on chemical patterns. It seems that the bacterial cell immobilization method induces very weak physical tension and no chemical contamination on the bacterial cell membrane. 

Park et have also used capillary force created by 

As illustrated before, both control of meniscus velocity and cell density were critical in regard with the efficiency and uniformity of the process. Here the mobility of the cells in the suspension is also critical to preserve the assembly mechanism. The complexity of the buffers used in biology and the interaction forces between the cells themselves and the surfaces are clearly the limitation of this method. 

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