Supramolecular Hydrogelators and Hydrogels: From Soft Matter to Molecular Biomaterials
By Xuewen Du, Jie Zhou, Junfeng Shi, Bing Xu. Chemical Reviews, 2015
1,587 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This review intends to provide a relatively comprehensive summary of the work of supramolecular hydrogelators after 2004 and to put emphasis particularly on the applications of supramolecular hydrogels/hydrogelators as molecular biomaterials. After a brief introduction of methods for generating supramolecular hydrogels, we discuss supramolecular hydrogelators based on their categories, such as small organic molecules, coordination complexes, peptides, nucleobases, and saccharides. Following molecular design, we focus on various potential applications of supramolecular hydrogels as molecular biomaterials, classified by their applications in cell cultures, tissue engineering, cell behavior, imaging, and unique applications of hydrogelators. Particularly, we discuss the applications of supramolecular hydrogelators after they form supramolecular assemblies but prior to reaching the critical gelation concentration (CGC) because this subject is less explored but may hold equally great promises for helping address fundamental questions about the mechanisms or the consequences of the self-assembly of molecules, including low molecular weight ones. Finally, we provide a perspective on supramolecular hydrogelators. We hope that this review will serve as an updated introduction and reference for researchers who are interested in exploring supramolecular hydrogelators as molecular biomaterials for addressing the societal needs at various frontiers.
Subfields: Biomaterials, Molecular Biology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d2ca2f2b3ed8f2bd65fbf7123a5cce583750271d
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In Biomaterials
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Citations in the corpus
- Supramolecular Chemistry: A Toolkit for Soft Functional Materials and Organic Particles (2017, background): “An advantage of supramolecular gels over others types is their inherent reversibility, which is important in applications such as delivery systems.(53) Gels in which weak forces hold fibers recover faster to their original state after breaking, exhibiting thixotropic behavior.”