Extremely Stable Supramolecular Hydrogels Assembled from Nonionic Peptide Amphiphiles.

Abstract

Peptide hydrogels with high stability in different media are of great interest in biomedical applications. In this paper, we report an easy, fast, and scalable method for preparing a family of nonionic peptide amphiphiles (PAs) obtained by direct aminolysis of alkyl-oilgo(γ-benzyl-l-glutamate) samples, which were synthesized via the alkyl amine-initiated sequence ring-opening reaction of α-amino acid N-carboxyanhydrides. One great advantage of this method is that vast chemical diversity and large-scale yields can be achieved easily using commercially available hydramines. These PA samples can readily form a clear hydrogel without any external aid and show exceptionally enhanced gelation properties with a critical gelation concentration as low as 0.05 wt %. The hydrogels are highly stable against extreme pH values of 1 and 14 and a high salt concentration of 200 mM NaCl. These properties combined with the shear-thinning properties make these PA hydrogels ideal candidates for the new generation of injectable scaffolds.