No abstract

Understanding of stem cell−surface interactions and, in particular, long-term maintenance of stem cell pluripotency on well-defined synthetic surfaces is crucial for fundamental research and biomedical applications of stem cells. Here, we show that synthetic surfaces possessing hierarchical micro-nano roughness (MN-surfaces) promote long-term self-renewal (>3 weeks) of mouse embryonic stem cells (mESCs) as monitored by the expression levels of the pluripotency markers octamer-binding transcription factor 4 (Oct4), Nanog, and alkaline phosphatase. On the contrary, culturing of mESCs on either smooth (S-) or nanorough polymer surfaces (N-surfaces) leads to their fast differentiation. Moreover, we show that regular passaging of mESCs on the hierarchical MN-polymer surface leads to an increased homogeneity and percentage of Oct4-positive stem cell colonies as compared to mESCs grown on fibroblast feeder cells. Immunostaining revealed the absence of focal adhesion markers on all polymer substrates studied. However, only the MN-surfaces elicited the formation of actin-positive cell protrusions, indicating an alternative anchorage mechanism involved in the maintenance of mESC stemness.

We give a proof of perturbative renormalizability of SU(2) YangMills theory in four-dimensional Euclidean space which is based on the Flow Equations of the renormalization group. The main motivation is to present a proof which does not make appear mathematically undefined objects (as for example dimensionally regularized generating functionals), which permits to parametrize the theory in terms of physical renormalization conditions, and which allows to control the singularities of the correlation functions of the theory in the infrared domain. Thus a large part of the proof is dedicated to bounds on massless correlation functions.