Stem cell patterning in the single cell microchip platform

On the way to open the mysteries of life in genome, single cell platform becomes one crucial tool to explore the electrochemical and electrophysiologic behavior of single cells such as stem cell for tissue engineering. As the pilot study of such a platform, we have successfully implemented stem cell patterning on an array of electrodes in the gold-silicon wafer by using microcontact printing technique. Several interesting behavior were found as single stem cells sticked on the electrodes coated with cell-favored material. A stem cell would like to stretch itself to cover the whole area of the electrode as much as it could no matter how the geometry of the electrode looked like. However, the cell would rather rest on the edge of the electrode when it was unable to stretch itself to cover the whole electrode area. In the next step, we are building up the single cell platform by implementing the whole-cell clamp or patch clamp on the electrode array.