Credit: Credit: William Daly, Eric Nguyen and Mike Schwartz, UW-Madison
In the lab of William Murphy at UW-Madison, these six experimental samples are substrates that were evaluated for their ability to support stem cells. The samples, each 1 millimeter in diameter, and contain subtle chemical and physical variations, affecting such factors as hardness, speed of breakdown, and points for cellular attachment. Inset shows a network of blood vessels generated for the new Nature Biomedical Engineering paper, based on stem cells that grew on one particular substrate.