Mesonic eightfold way from dynamics and confinement in strongly coupled lattice quantum chromodynamics J. Math. Phys. 49, 072301 (2008) Bosonic color-flavor transformation for the special unitary group J. Math. Phys. 46, 072306 (2005) Charge superselection sectors for QCD on the lattice J. Math. Phys. 46, 032303 (2005) Consistent and mimetic discretizations in general relativity J. Math. Phys. 46, 032501 (2005) Additional information on AIP Conf. Proc. Abstract. We present preliminary results for the running coupling in the Schrödinger functional scheme in QCD with four flavours. A single-component staggered quark field is used on lattices of size (L/a) 3 × (L/a ± 1). This provides us with 2 different regularisations of the same renormalized coupling, and thus some control over the size of lattice artefacts. These are found to be comparatively large, calling for a more refined analysis, which still remains to be done.