title: Single nonfouling hydrogels with mechanical and chemical functionality gradients.
abstract: Hydrogels are widely studied as tissue engineering scaffolds, but the biological tissues they are designed to mimic are often complex tissues with non-uniform chemical and mechanical profiles. This work reports a new strategy to create hydrogels composed of a continuous sheet of a single nonfouling but functionalizable material with mechanical and/or chemical functionality gradients. By using different combinations of functionalizable or nonfunctionalizable versions of nonfouling carboxybetaine methacrylate (CBMA) and carboxybetaine dimethacrylate crosslinker (CBMAX), various hydrogels with gradients of crosslinking densities and/or functionalizable groups can be created. In this work, we demonstrate this concept with two nonfouling hydrogels, both with a mechanical gradient: one with uniform functionalizability and the other with a gradient in chemical functionalizability. With this versatile system, hydrogels with built-in gradient profiles of various types can be controlled at will for a given application.
authors: Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Washington, Box 351750, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.
authors: Louisa R
authors: LR
authors: Carr
authors: Jordan E
authors: JE
authors: Krause
authors: Jean-Rene
authors: JR
authors: Ella-Menye
authors: Shaoyi
authors: S
authors: Jiang
mesh_terms: D020100:Hydrogels
chemical_list: D020100:Hydrogels