Sustainable, flexible and biocompatible hydrogels derived from microbial polysaccharides with tailorable structures for tissue engineering

Abstract

Polysaccharides derived from microorganisms have received considerable attention in designing hydrogel materials. However, most microbial polysaccharide-constructed hydrogels evaluated in preclinical trials are not favorable candidates for biomedical applications owing to concerns regarding poor mechanical strength and complicated fabrication process. Herein, we describe a new polysaccharide hydrogel scaffold containing salecan together with gellan gum network as the polymeric matrix. Properly controlling the physical and chemical properties including swelling, water release, thermal stability, viscoelasticity and morphology of the resulting gel are easily achieved by simply changing the salecan/gellan gum ratios. Notably, these salecan/gellan gum scaffolds friendly support cell survival and proliferation. More significantly, we have systematically evaluated these developed hydrogels for the biocompatible experiments in vitro and in vivo and results indicated the products are non-toxic. Taken together, such hydrogels derived from microbial polysaccharides and readily synthesized through a one-step mixing protocol have translational potentials in the clinic serving as cell devices for tissue engineering.