DNA hydrogel microspheres and their potential applications for protein delivery and live cell monitoring

Abstract

Microfluidic devices have been extensively developed as methods for microscale materials fabrication. It has also been adopted for polymeric microsphere fabrication and in situ drug encapsulation. Here, we employed multi-inlet microfluidic channels for DNA hydrogel microsphere formation and in situ protein encapsulation. The release of encapsulated proteins from DNA hydrogels showed different profiles accordingly with the size of microspheres. Published by AIP Publishing.

DNA Hydrogel Assemblies: Bridging Synthesis Principles to Biomedical Applications

“…Furthermore, the system was biocompatible and only upon light irradiation, it induced toxicity on B16F10 mouse melanoma cells, both in vitro and in vivo. The observed cytotoxicity was then attributed to the controlled release of DOX plus increment of temperature on the tumor, which is known to induce tumor ablation . In another study, Yata et al .…”

“…Although attempts for the fabrication of DNA hydrogels are still in their early stages, there is a scientific consensus on their affirmative implications to pave the road for further advances on various medical fields, such as drug and gene delivery, biosensing, and tissue engineering . Different methods, including physical entanglement, chemical cross‐linking, and electrostatic interaction with cationic (poly)electrolytes can be used to prepare DNA hydrogels . However, in many of these cases, DNA behaves as a polymeric structure that cannot be assembled into ordered defined structures, resulting in lack of precise control over the structure needed for specific functions .…”

How to Construct DNA Hydrogels for Environmental Applications: Advanced Water Treatment and Environmental Analysis

“…DNA is an ideal scaffolding and natural polymer, and constructs senior structures by the combination of canonical/noncanonical base pairs . It has been reported that the formation of DNA hydrogels is via physical or chemical reaction, e.g., enzyme ligation[1a,26,28] or even self‐assembly[9a,10a,29] by special DNA motif structures.…”

“…Subsequently, to make further efforts to extend the technology, the same group incorporated sufficient X‐DNA with actual plasmid genes through T4 DNA ligase to obtain cell‐free protein‐producing gel. [28d] The protein‐producing efficiency of gel was about 300 times higher than solution phase systems and 1.52 times higher than the simple mixture of X‐DNA and Rluc gene, suggesting that the hydrogel format is necessary to reach the highest expression level. Besides, the proposed system is a universal protein‐producing system, i.e., other systems in a similar fashion can also produce various proteins using the cross‐linking between different plasmids and DNA scaffolding.…”

“…Adapted with permission. [28b] Copyright 2006, Nature Publishing Group. b) T4 DNA enzyme‐catalyzed ligation: X‐, Y‐, T‐DNA serve as cross‐linkers to form networked gels.…”