Introduction

The Alvéole PRIMO is a micropatterning, hydrogel polymerization and microfabrication device that creates custom made in vitro cellular microenvironments. The technology is based on the digital micromirror device (DMD) technology that illuminates a pattern by UV laser of 375nm. The substrate (e.g., glass bottom dishes or coverslip) is coated with an anti fouling polymer (PEG). Through the combined action with a photoactivatable reagent (PLPP) the UV will locally degrade the non adherent coating down to a maximum resolution of 1.2µm and 256 levels of grey to enable selective deposition of proteins only on the illuminated areas.

UV pattern photoactivation can also be used on common hydrogels to produce structured substrates with controlled geometry and stiffness.

Applications include cytoskeleton dynamics, cell adhesion force measurement, cell confinement, cell migration, tissue engineering, spheroids, TEM grids and production of microfluidics.

The system is connected to an IX83 Olympus inverted microscope equipped with an Olympus LUCPlanFLN x20 objective and a pco.panda 4.2 sCMOS camera.

Software

The Leonardo photopatterning software controls all the elements of the PRIMO system: UV illumination, microscope, camera and stage to define the experimental conditions and works on downloaded images that can be previewed, positioned and multiplicated to suit the experimental conditions.

New users

Please contact Maya Holdengreber, tel. 073-378-1106 to coordinate a meeting.

Reservations

For photopatterning experiments, the Alvéole PRIMO can be reserved through our BookItLab online reservation system (SAFe360 PRIMO).