Massively-multicellular alignment with the self-aggregate of air bubbles

This study proposes a cell manipulation method with aggregated air bubbles on cell culture medium. This method requires no additional regents nor devices, except for normal cell-culture materials such as cell culture dishes and pipettes. Bubbles generated by pipetting were spontaneously aggregated with regularity on the whole surface and used as a mask for avoiding cell adhesion after cell-seeding. The diameter of bubbles was able to be controlled by the size of micro-pipette tips. Seeded cells spread to the whole area along the bubble gap. This technique is a surface-tension-driven self-assembly-based method. Using this technique, millions of living cells were successfully aligned into a hexagonal pattern within 300 μm in pattern width on the whole surface of dish for less than 2 h.