Fig. 1.

(A) Schematic of PEG-NB microsphere synthesis for covalent peptide incorporation. Shown is the emulsion procedure for synthesizing PEG microspheres using thiolene chemistry. (B) (top) Bright-field image of Blank PEG microspheres; the scale bar represents 100 µm. (bottom) Graph of mean microsphere diameter ±1 SD at a range of incorporated peptide concentrations, as determined using ImageJ software. (C, D) Comparison of peptide density and affinity, and their effect on VEGF binding at 1 mg ml⁻¹ microspheres and 10 ng ml⁻¹ recombinant human VEGF in 0.1% BSA in PBS loading solution. (C) Amount of VEGF bound per weight of microspheres with covalently tethered Scramble microspheres (dashed line, boxes), VBP_WT microspheres (dotted line, Xs) and VBP microspheres (solid line, triangles). Sequestered VEGF for Blank microspheres is shown (alternating dashes and dots), with the gray area outlining the average ±1 SD. (D) Effective dissociation constant, K_D, of microsphere binding to soluble VEGF. Results are indicated as K_D ± SD, with symbols indicating a significant difference compared to 0.4% (*), 0.8% (#) and 1.6% (&) of each respective peptide at a p < 0.05.