Mechanosensing of neurons in 3D brain surrogate

The replication of the complex structure and three dimensional (3-D) interconnectivity of neurons in the brain is a great challenge. A few 3-D neuronal patterning approaches have been developed to mimic the cell distribution in the brain but none have demonstrated the relationship between 3-D neuron patterning and network connectivity. Here, we used photolithographic crosslinking to fabricate in vitro 3-D neuronal structures with distinct sizes, shapes or interconnectivity, i.e., milli-blocks, micro-stripes, separated micro-blocks and connected micro-blocks, which have spatial confinement from “Z” dimension.