Bioinspired Supramolecular Hydrogel from Design to Applications

Abstract

Nature offers a wealth of opportunities to solve scientific and technological issues based on its unique structures and function. The dynamic non‐covalent interaction is considered to be the main base of living functions of creatures including humans, animals, and plants. Supramolecular hydrogels formed by non‐covalent bonding interactions has become a unique platform for constructing promising materials for medicine, energy, electronic, and biological substitute. In this review, the self‐assemble principle of supramolecular hydrogels is summarized. Next, the stimulation of external environment that triggers the assembly or disassembly of supramolecular hydrogels are recapitulated, including temperature, mechanics, light, pH, ions, etc. The main applications of bioinspired supramolecular hydrogels in terms of bionic objects including humans, animals, and plants are also described. Although so many efforts are done for revealing the synergized mechanism of the function and non‐covalent interactions on the supramolecular hydrogel, the complexity and variability between stimulus and non‐covalent bonding in the supramolecular system still require impeccable theories. As an outlook, the bioinspired supramolecular hydrogel is just beginning to exhibit its great potential in human life, offering significant opportunities in drug delivery and screening, implantable devices and substitutions, tissue engineering, micro‐fluidic devices, and biosensors.

Design of Fatigue‐Resistant Hydrogels

“…Skeletal muscles and bones have evolved to slow down and prevent the propagation of cracks during cyclic loads, an essential feature for maintaining functional stability in weight‐bearing biological tissues. [ 45 ] Skeletal muscles have a hierarchical structure at various scales, from folded proteins at the molecular scale to noncovalent bonds to muscle fibers at the micrometer scale. These muscles can endure over a billion cycles of repeated stretching and contracting, but can still rupture even with damage.…”

Exploring a Solvent Dependent Strategy to Control Self‐Assembling Behavior and Cellular Interaction in Laminin‐Mimetic Short Peptide based Supramolecular Hydrogels

“…Several works in the literature have suggested the propensity of bioactive sequences to spontaneously self‐assemble, resulting in the development of porous hydrogels [2a,5a,8,10] . These hydrogels can be readily tuned by modulating parameters including pH, and various other locally or environmentally applied stimuli such as light, solvents, temperature, enzymes, chemical stimuli, and magnetic fields [11] .…”

“…The structural versatility emerges from the intricate balance between the attractive and repulsive forces within the system, leading to the formation of higher‐order nanostructures. Such structural diversity can further provide various distinctive functionalities to the self‐assembled system [2a,3] . Moreover, the precise arrangements of the amino acids within the peptides determine the self‐assembling pathways dictated by several intermolecular interactions, which can ultimately determine the final nanostructures adopted by these self‐assembling peptides, which include the formation of nanotubes, nanofibers, nanospheres, nanovesicles, etc [4] .…”