Breath Figure Patterns Made Easy

In this work, a simple breath figure method was proposed to directly fabricate large-area and ordered honeycomb structures on commercial PMMA substrates or PS Petri dishes without the use of an external polymer solution. The obtained honeycomb structure is indeed part of the substrate, providing the honeycomb layer with enough mechanical stability. The breath figure method in this work for the synthesis of honeycomb structure is extremely simple with scale-up capability to large-area production, which offers new insights into surface engineering with great potential in commercial technologies. For example, using the honeycomb-patterned Petri dishes prepared via this method, cells can be easily separated into divided aggregation, which favors understanding of naturally occurring networks in higher organisms and cell-cell and cell-matrix interactions, and the therapeutic control of genetic circuits.