title: Oxidatively Responsive Chain Extension to Entangle Engineered Protein Hydrogels.
abstract: Engineering artificial protein hydrogels for medical applications requires precise control over their mechanical properties, including stiffness, toughness, extensibility and stability in the physiological environment. Here we demonstrate topological entanglement as an effective strategy to robustly increase the mechanical tunability of a transient hydrogel network based on coiled-coil interactions. Chain extension and entanglement are achieved by coupling the cysteine residues near the N- and C- termini, and the resulting chain distribution is found to agree with the Jacobson-Stockmayer theory. By exploiting the reversible nature of the disulfide bonds, the entanglement effect can be switched on and off by redox stimuli. With the presence of entanglements, hydrogels exhibit a 7.2-fold enhanced creep resistance and a suppressed erosion rate by a factor of 5.8, making the gels more mechanically stable in a physiologically relevant open system. While hardly affecting material stiffness (only resulting in a 1.5-fold increase in the plateau modulus), the entanglements remarkably lead to hydrogels with a toughness of 65,000 J m-3and extensibility to approximately 3,000% engineering strain, which enables the preparation of tough yet soft tissue simulants. This improvement in mechanical properties resembles that from double-network hydrogels, but is achieved with the use of a single associating network and topological entanglement. Therefore, redox-triggered chain entanglement offers an effective approach for constructing mechanically enhanced and responsive injectable hydrogels.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
authors.forename: Shengchang
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Tang
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
authors.forename: Matthew J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Glassman
authors.affiliation: Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, California Institute of Technology, 1200 E. California Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91125, USA.
authors.forename: Shuaili
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
authors.forename: Simona
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Socrate
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
authors.forename: Bradley D
authors.initials: BD
authors.lastname: Olsen