Figure 1.

Schematic description of how nanoscale adhesion ligand organization was varied. A single adhesion ligand can be coupled to a polymer chain and uniformly distributed through the hydrogel (A). In contrast, the polymer chains can be also modified to contain multiple peptides, and then these chains can be simply mixed with unmodified polymer chains to form discrete ligand islands (B). In this example, the bulk ligand density (overall number of peptides/volume) was maintained constant in (A) and (B), while varying the island density (number of peptides/polymer chain) and island spacing (distance between polymer chains containing coupled peptides).