Over the past decades, molecular and cellular neuroscience has taken major steps towards understanding how the nervous system develops, functions and occasionally fails in disease. With billions of neurons interconnected via trillions of synapses, the complexity of mammalian brain poses a tremendous challenge for experimental scientists. Even reduced preparations, such as cultures of dissociated primary neurons, pose significant experimental challenges due to difficulties in controlling the growth and connectivity of axons and dendrites. Chemical cues and micropatterned surfaces have long been used to control growth of neurites in cell culture conditions. Neurons adhere and grow on glass surface coated with adhesive proteins but not on native glass. Finely defined patterns of adhesive proteins can be produced by selective coating and denaturation of neurite growth-promoting proteins [1] or by microcontact printing of protein substrates on glass coverslips [2]. Axons will find their paths along the thin lines of attractive substrate while somas will be restricted to the larger coated areas.
