Adhesion of U937 monocytes on polymer surfaces: Chemistry or electrostatics?

There exists a large body of published literature, some going back several decades, that points to electrostatic (i.e. physical) adhesive forces between biomaterials surfaces and living cells, as opposed to chemical ones. Nevertheless, in view of the inherent complexity of biological phenomena, including cell biology, it is rarely simple to be able to separate them unambiguously, as we hope to have illustrated here.