Abstract
A biocompatible method of glutathione (GSH) catalyzed disulfide bond reduction was used to form Fmoc-short peptide-based supramolecular hydrogels. The hydrogels could form in both buffer solution and cell culture medium containing 10% of Fetal Bovine Serum (FBS) within minutes. The hydrogel was characterized by rheology, transmission electron microscopy, and fluorescence emission spectra. Their potential in three dimensional (3D) cell culture was evaluated and the results indicated that the gel with a low concentration of the peptide (0.1 wt%) was suitable for 3D cell culture of 3T3 cells. This study provides an alternative candidate of supramolecular hydrogel for 3D cell culture and cell delivery.
Highlights
Supramolecular hydrogels of peptides have attracted extensive research interests in recent years due to the ease of design and synthesis, easy integration of bioactive ligands, and functionality [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
Among the reported peptide hydrogel systems, RADA16 and its derivatives [23,24], peptide amphiphiles [25,26], Q11 and its derivatives [27,28], FEK8 and its analogues [29,30], and those based on dipeptide of FF [31,32,33,34,35] are the most widely investigated
Nilsson group had firstly developed a novel method of disulfide bond reduction to trigger a supramolecular hydrogel formation [45], which was followed by us to prepare short peptide-based hydrogels for cell culture and drug delivery [46]
Summary
Supramolecular hydrogels of peptides have attracted extensive research interests in recent years due to the ease of design and synthesis, easy integration of bioactive ligands, and functionality [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9] They have shown big potential in three dimensional (3D) cell culture [10,11], controllable delivery of therapeutic agents [12,13,14,15], immune boosting [16], sensing [17,18,19,20], and regenerative medicine [21,22]. We opted to applied this method to prepare hydrogels based on the Fmoc-FF and tested the possibility of the formed hydrogel in 3D cell culture, which was reported in this study
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