Abstract
Hydrogels have outstanding research and application prospects in the biomedical field. Among them, the design and preparation of biomedical hydrogels with deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) as building blocks have attracted increasing research interest. DNA-based hydrogel not only has the skeleton function of hydrogel, but also retains its biological functions, including its excellent selection specificity, structural designability, precise molecular recognition ability, outstanding biocompatibility, and so on. It has shown important application prospects in the biomedical field, such as drug delivery, biosensing, and tissue engineering. In recent years, researchers have made full use of the characteristics of DNA molecules and constructed various pure DNA-based hydrogels with excellent properties through various crosslinking methods. Moreover, via introducing functional molecules or elements, or combining with other functional materials, a variety of multifunctional DNA-based hybrid hydrogels have also been constructed, which expand the breadth and depth of their applications. Here, we described the recent development trend in the area of DNA-based hydrogels and highlighted various preparation methods of DNA-based hydrogels. Representative biomedical applications are also exemplified to show the high performance of DNA-based hydrogels. Meanwhile, the existing problems and prospects are also summarized. This review provided references for the further development of DNA-based hydrogels.
Highlights
Hydrogel is a three-dimensional (3D) polymer composite system composed of water and crosslinked polymers
The sticky ends of the Y-scaffold and linker can be complementary to each other by hydrogen bonding, and this hybridization will lead to the formation of the hydrogel. This pure deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)-based hydrogel could reversibly respond to the thermal stimulus by switching between the gel and sol state across a transition temperature, as well as respond to enzymes when restriction sites are inserted into the building blocks, which provide a new type of smart materials for diverse biomedical applications
The results showed that the elastic modulus of the obtained DNA-based hydrogel increased with the increase of Ethylene glycol diglycidyl ether (EGDE) content (Topuz and Okay, 2008, 2009)
Summary
Hydrogel is a three-dimensional (3D) polymer composite system composed of water and crosslinked polymers. Nagahara and Matsuda (1996) covalently introduced oligonucleotides into the side chain of polymer chains and prepared an intermolecular crosslinked hydrogel through hydrogen bonding of bases This was the first report on DNA-based hybrid hydrogels to be designed and synthesized. We summarized and elaborated the development, preparation, and biomedical applications of pure DNA-based hydrogels and DNA-based hybrid hydrogels in recent years (Figure 1). Pure DNA-based hydrogels are a type of hydrogels composed entirely of deoxyribonucleotide chains They are usually formed through hydrogen bonding, physical entanglement, or enzymatic reaction between chains (Figure 1). Because of the precise structural controllability, specific responsiveness, and excellent biodegradability, pure DNA-based hydrogels play a considerable role in the construction of sensitive smart materials for drug delivery, biosensing, and other biomedical applications
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