A research group led by Associate Professor Xiang Li of the Faculty of Advanced Life Science, Hokkaido University, and a Doctoral Student, Masashi Ohira of the Department of Bioengineering, Graduate School of Engineering, the University of Tokyo, has successfully predicted and controlled the flowability of hydrogels by designing DNA sequences.
Hydrogels are soft and fluid materials, such as yogurt and slime, used as medical materials, including artificial vitreous bodies and anti-adhesive materials. Applying hydrogels to medical materials is important to predict and control their fluidity, but it has not been easy to achieve this under physiological conditions.
The research group has focused on the fact that the stability of the double helix structure formed by DNA is greatly affected by the DNA base sequence and has synthesized a new hydrogel cross-linked by the DNA double helix structure. The macroscopic flow time of these gels was investigated and found to be consistent with the dissociation time of the DNA double helix structure over a wide time range. The results of this study suggest that it is possible to synthesize hydrogels with arbitrary fluidity even under physiological conditions by using this method.
The results of this research are expected to be applied to medical fields such as cell culture media with flowability close to that of living organisms, injectable gel materials, and soft robotics.
The research results were published online in Advanced Materials on Wednesday, February 16, 2022.
Title： Star-Polymer-DNA Gels Showing Highly Predictable and Tunable Mechanical Responses
URL：https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202108818