Logic flow of activities.

<p>Scheme of the activities carried out in this study: images of outgrowing neurites were taken from biological experiments performed on PC12, and analysed to investigate the morphology of terminals. Simple FE models were built from these morphological data to study, accounting for geometry and constraints, the course of stress at the intersection between collapsed growth cones and filopodia. Then, an analytic model was written to account for the nanograting geometry and to implement in silico simulations. In silico results were compared with biological data to validate the whole procedure and to provide predictions on more complex geometries.