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. 2018 Jan 23;8:1464. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-19804-1

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© The Author(s) 2018

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Experimental workflow. (A) Magnetic micro-pillars and template are made by optical lithography followed by deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) and iron deposition by sputtering. The magnetic pillars are mechanically detached from the wafer and mixed with soft PDMS prior to casting between a sheet of polypropylene coated with fluorescent beads and a coverslip. (B) The resulting sandwich structure is positioned on a magnetic template laid on a large permanent magnet, so as to align the pillars vertically (side view) and organize them according to the pattern of the template (top view). (C) After peeling off the polypropylene sheet, coating the surface with proteins and plating cells on the top, the substrates are placed in the magnetic field generated by two electromagnets so as to actuate the pillars via a magnetic torque. The actuation setup is mounted on a microscope to quantify the local deformation of the surface by tracking the fluorescent beads and to follow the response of the cells to the mechanical stimulation.