Chapter 6 – Patterning Gradients

Surface-chemical and -morphological gradients can be extremely useful in cell-biological research as high-throughput screening tools—for example, exposing a given set of cells to many different surface conditions at once, under identical ambient conditions, in order to monitor cell behavior such as proliferation or specific gene expression. They can also be used to investigate the effects of gradients themselves on cell behavior, such as migration. A number of simple, reliable techniques for both chemical- and morphological-gradient fabrication have been developed in our laboratories and are described in detail in the following.