Abstract
Tissue engineering has emerged to create artificial tissues and organs to mimic, repair, or replace damaged or injured tissues and organs using combinations of cells, biomaterials, and biologically active molecules. A major challenge in tissue engineering is to control the cellular behavior in the scaffold in three dimensions in a desired fashion to help the growth of engineered tissues in a controlled way. The ability to control the cell-surface interface spatially and temporally will make it possible to direct and control cell behavior. The recent advances in micro-and nano-fabrication technologies and microfluidic platforms have made it easy to engineer, manipulate, and modify cell-surface interface within the complex cell microenvironmental architecture. However, our understanding and ability to dynamically control the cellular behavior and the cell-surface interface has still remained limited. In this chapter, we focus on the recent advances in engineering cell-surface interface for cell-based biosensors and tissue engineering, with particular attention on surface -chemistry, microfabrication, microfluidics, and dynamic aspects of the cell-surface interface modifications.