Facile Use of Cationic Hydrogel Particles for Surface Modification of Planar Substrates Toward Multifunctional Neural Permissive Surfaces: An in Vitro Investigation.

Synthetic materials such as silicon have been commonly used for neural interfacing applications but are intrinsically noninteractive with neurons. Here, a facile approach has been developed to integrate both chemical and topographical cues to impart neural permissiveness for such materials. The approach simply exploits the basic phenomenon of electrostatically driven adsorption of colloidal particles onto a solid material and applies it to a cationic hydrogel particle system that we have developed recently based on "click" reaction of epoxide and amine.