| Soft tissue reconstruction in the nervous system is sensitive to the mechanical and chemical cues of the growth microenvironment. Many technologies have been designed to study these stimuli and their effect on the regional extracellular environment (ECM). Because of the hard-to-achieve and costliness of these technologies, biologists are usually reluctant to employ them to study cellular behaviors. In addition, the complexity of the nervous system, particularly in cases of nerve repair and reconstruction, necessitates the development of facile high- throughput investigational tools. The objective for this dissertation is to examine and manipulate neuronal cell-cell and cell-ECM responses to varying nervous system microenvironment stimuli in a 3-D in vitro model. |
