Abstract
Hydrogels have been extensively used in many fields. Current synthesis of functional hydrogels requires incorporation of functional molecules either before or during gelation via the pre-organized reactive site along the polymer chains within hydrogels, which is tedious for polymer synthesis and not flexible for different types of hydrogels. Inspired by sandcastle worm, we develop a simple one-step strategy to functionalize wet hydrogels using molecules bearing an adhesive dibutylamine-DOPA-lysine-DOPA tripeptide. This tripeptide can be easily modified with various functional groups to initiate diverse types of polymerizations and provide functional polymers with a terminal adhesive tripeptide. Such functional molecules enable direct modification of wet hydrogels to acquire biological functions such as antimicrobial, cell adhesion and wound repair. The strategy has a tunable functionalization degree and a stable attachment of functional molecules, which provides a tool for direct and convenient modification of wet hydrogels to provide them with diverse functions and applications.
Highlights
Hydrogels have been extensively used in many fields
Hydrogels can be prepared from a large variety of hydrophilic polymers including but not limited to polysaccharides (chitosan[16], sodium alginate (ALG)[17] etc.), poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG)[18], poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA)[19], poly(2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate) (PHEMA)[20], poly(sulfobetaine methacrylate) (PSBMA)[21], and related polymers[22,23,24,25]
We demonstrated a convenient synthesis of this amine terminated DbaYKY through a solid-phase method (Supplementary Fig. 3), which enables other research groups and companies to obtain DbaYKY thereby greatly expanding its applications
Summary
Hydrogels have been extensively used in many fields. Current synthesis of functional hydrogels requires incorporation of functional molecules either before or during gelation via the pre-organized reactive site along the polymer chains within hydrogels, which is tedious for polymer synthesis and not flexible for different types of hydrogels. We develop a simple one-step strategy to functionalize wet hydrogels using molecules bearing an adhesive dibutylamine-DOPA-lysine-DOPA tripeptide This tripeptide can be modified with various functional groups to initiate diverse types of polymerizations and provide functional polymers with a terminal adhesive tripeptide. Adhesive materials have been extensively studied especially the mussel-inspired adhesive materials[33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43] Many of these studies use molecules that are terminally functionalized with 3,4-dihydroxy-L-phenylalanine (DOPA) or DOPA-lysine combinations to realize surface modifications[44,45,46,47,48,49]. The DbaYKY peptide enables direct modification of functional molecules to the surface and interior of hydrogels in an aqueous environment, providing hydrogels with diverse functions such as anti-bacteria, cell adhesion for tissue engineering, and wound healing (Fig. 1c)
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