Inside Front Cover: (Adv. Funct. Mater. 12/2008)

Surprisingly, a simple, cost-effective, chemical binding system, that is, an epoxide group, is found to successfully compete with the expensive biological binding mechanism of extracellular matrix protein gel (ECM). Here, osteoblasts are shown to exhibit preferential adhesion to the epoxide functional monolayer (black areas) over the microcontact printed ECM (blue areas). A proliferation study and MTT test did not reveal any adverse side effects of epoxide functional monolayers on the cells.