Cells interact with the extracellular environment by recognizing molecular signals, processing the information and eventually changing its state.

Understanding the language with which cells communicate with the external environments plays an essential role to design and develop a novel class of bioactive materials. As Nature provides cells with multiple signals and orchestrates their spatial arrangement and temporal evolution we must create smart platforms which present the correct signals at the right time and in the right place. This of course raises relevant cognitive and technological issues.

Firstly, the basic cell biology underlying cell-material interactions are largely obscure. Secondly, novel design concepts have to be developed in order to efficiently encode arrays of bioactive signals on synthetic platforms, with a precise spatial arrangement and temporal evolution.

The research activities involved in this project will use nanotechnologies and nanomanipulation techniques in order to encode on synthetic platforms, arrays of selected biophysical/biochemical signals with tight spatial and temporal control.