Surface chemical modifications of materials which influence animal cell adhesion-a review

This review paper seeks to provide a view of the state of the art of the field of biomaterials focused on in vitro examinations of cell/biomaterial surface interactions. Two historical approaches have been utilized for understanding animal cell adhesion (or abhesion) to materials' surfaces. The first approach is to correlate response (cell morphology, adhesion, retention or higher cellular function) to the character (structure, morphology, chemistry) of the material surface. This approach can only yield a correlation, since the microscopic details of cell surface response are not examined. A number of studies have been published attempting to draw conclusions from cell response to such surfaces. A second approach has been to assume that the cell/biomaterial surface interactions are governed by the same biologically specific chemistry as cell/cell surface interactions. These studies tend to ignore the surface chemistry of the materials, indeed attempting to mediate its response by coating to make the material "inert". In this review, proposals concerning the necessary and sufficient properties of materials, the effects of extracellular matrix (ECM) protein and conditioning film structure, the composition of the medium, and the specificity or generality of cellular response are evaluated for a range of studies, each chosen to illustrate the state of the art of a portion of this field. The authors conclude with specific recommendations about biomaterial synthesis and characterization for cellular biological studies.