The Synergy of Electrospinning and Imprinting for Faithful Replication of Fiber Structures

Electrospinning is a powerful method to fabricate structures resembling the fibrous texture of the native extracellular matrix. However, the random fiber deposition of the process hinders a faithful reproduction of the fiber mesh morphology on multiple samples, which raises difficulties in experimental designs to systematically test and assess cell response in vitro. A multi-replication process to precisely reproduce the fiber morphology on different cell culture substrates is developed. The process involves a decoupling of the fiber structure, material, and porosity by combining the key advantages of electrospinning and imprinting. With this, fiber patterns having a diameter between 0.4 and 2.8 µm are replicated on polycarbonate, polystyrene, poly(methyl methacrylate), and cyclic olefin copolymer films. Identical fiber morphology is, then, obtained on porous films having a pore diameter between 2 and 12 µm. Having full control over these parameters allows the multireplication process to engineer well-characterized cell microenvironments, which can potentially be used to further investigate complex cell–material interactions.