Hydrogels are three-dimensional network structures obtained from a class of synthetic and/or natural polymers which can absorb and retain significant amount of water. The hydrogels have been used extensively in various biomedical applications such as drug delivery, cell carriers and/or entrapment, wound management and tissue engineering. Sacran is cyanobacterial-polysaccharide extracted from <i>Aphanothece sacrum</i> which contain 11% of sulfate group, 22% of carboxyl group and about 250% of hydroxyl group to sugar residues. Moreover sacran has a very high molecular weight of around 29 Mg/mol and then a super-absorbent property to induce an anti-inflammatory activity. We found that it can be prepared the physical hydrogel of sacran from the film which is made by cast-drying method. Concretely, the 0.5% sacran solution was dried in oven at 60 ℃ for 12 h to create the thin film (about 50 μm), and the film was immersed into pure water to anisotropic hydrogels. Furthermore, it was found that the swollen degree of the gels was controlled from 20 to 800 times by the heating treatment of the film between 70 and 140 ℃. As a result, swelling anisotropy of Z-direction of the hydrogels to XY-direction was extremely high values ranging between 10 times, which should be applicable to medical sheets easily handled beause of ristricted size change in face area of the sheets.

Ultra-anisotropic swelling of oriented hydrogels of giant cyanobacterial LC exopolysaccharides<br />

250th National Meeting (2015)

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