The critical steps involved: Stock solution preparation, dispensing step, polymerization, staining, degradation and readout (Figure ). For the preparation of the nanoliter sized droplets a Gyger Certus liquid dispensing system was used. Monomer stock solutions with low viscosity were required to guarantee high dispensing accuracy. To fit this need stock solutions with molarity between 1.66 M (for Monomers) and 0.58 M (for crosslinkers) were chosen. To set a parameter for comparison between the different experiments' monomer and cross-linker solution concentrations were chosen as a fixed parameter and only the molar ratio between monomer and crosslinker was varied.