Natural hydrogels like cartilage and skin show remarkable properties with Young’s moduli up to 100 MPa and fracture energies up to 9000 J m<sup>-2</sup>. Unfortunately, synthetic pendants indeed exhibit high fracture energies in a few cases, but suffer from low Young’s moduli of only 10 MPa in the best cases. Stiff hydrogels are strongly needed for membrane technologies and regenerative medicine.<br/>One way to achieve stiff hydrogels is the enzyme-induced mineralization. So far, this method has led to low degrees of mineralization and no remarkable increase in stiffness. Here, we present a method to afford mineralization of hydrogels by homogeneous immobilization of enzymes in these hydrogels followed by treating them in an aqueous precursor solution, where the salt is formed and precipitates in the polymer matrix, stiffening it in the process. One example is the urease-induced formation of calcium carbonate in poly(2-hydroxyethyl acrylate) followed by treatment with an aqueous urease and calcium chloride solution. The resulting network contains up to 95 wt% calcium carbonate and is greatly stiffened. Variation of matrices, conditions and other mineralization systems are presented as well.

Enzyme induced mineralization of hydrogels

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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