For the increasing demand of soft materials with wide range of applications, hydrogels have been developed exhibiting variety of functions (e.g. stretchable, self-healing, stimuli-responsive, and etc.). In general, most functional hydrogels have always utilize multiple components consisting of polymers and/or inorganic compounds to achieve the unique functions. The multi-conponent hydrogel systems often exhibit batch-dependent inconsistent results and mixing problems, require tremendous labors during preperations, and accompany unpredictable inter-molecular bindings between components. Here, we developed single component hydrogel, alginate-boronic acid (alginate-BA) hydrogel, that can exhibit unprecedented multi-functionalities simultaneously such as high stretchable, self-healing, shear-thinning, pH- and glucose-sensitivities, adhesive, and re-shaping properties. Advantages of single component functional hydrogels can address the aforementioned problems of inconsistency, mixing, and others. Multi-functionalities of alginate-BA hydrogel is resulted from the reversible inter-, intra-molecular interactions by dynamic equilibrium of boronic acid-diol complexation and dissociation. In addition, those interaction was further studied in microscopic level by atomic force microscopy pulling experiments. These findings suggest that our single component functional hydrogel shows potentials for use in wide ranges of biomedical applications.

Single component hydrogel simultaneously exhibiting stretchable, self-healing, stimuli-responsible, and adhesive properties

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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