Cell spreading correlates with calculated logP of amino acid-modified surfaces

The interactions of cells with synthetic surfaces are a critical factor in biomaterials design and it would be invaluable if these interactions could be precisely controlled and predicted. Hydrophobicity or lipophilicity of the surface is commonly used to rationalize cell attachment to materials. In the pharmaceutical sciences it is common practice to use logP, the partitioning coefficient between water and octanol, as a reliable indicator of the hydrophobicity or lipophilicity of (drug) molecules. A number of methods are available to reliably predict logP values directly from molecular structure. In this paper we demonstrate that logP values calculated on the basis of the molecular structure of a range of surface-tethered groups correlate well with cell spreading. To our knowledge this is the first method to predict cell spreading on chemically modified surfaces via nonspecific interactions.