Photo-responsive smart surfaces with controllable cell adhesion

In the past few years, photo-responsive smart surfaces have emerged as the promising candidates to investigate cell adhesion due to the noninvasive property and high spatiotemporal precision of photo stimuli. Under external optical stimulation, photo-responsive molecules can cleave their chemical bond or switch their configuration, thereby dynamically changing surface physicochemical properties such as wettability, polarity, and charge. Furthermore, the switchable physicochemical properties can directly or indirectly affect the interaction between cells and the smart surfaces, resulting in the controllable cell adhesion. This review briefly discusses the recent development of photo-responsive smart surfaces in the field of controllable cell adhesion taking advantage of photo cleavage, photo isomerization or photothermal effect. In doing so, we summarize the photo-responsive smart surfaces, including construction, modification and physicochemical properties switch, and their bioapplications in cell diagnostic, tissue engineering and cell medicine.