(Invited) Stimuli-Responsive Supramolecular Hydrogels

Abstract

Soft matters inspired by biological systems such as supramolecular hydrogels composed of self-assembled nanofibers exhibiting stimuli-response under aqueous conditions are attractive owing to their numerous potential bio-applications. However, installing response toward structurally complex biochemical stimuli into them remains a challenge. To overcome the obstacle, we developed simple strategy to introduce artificial chemical-stimuli-responsive cleavable groups into peptides to develop self-assembled supramolecular nanofibers capable of showing chemical stimuli-responsive degradation of the nanofibers and the corresponding hydrogel materials. More importantly, we found that the rational combination of the stimuli-responsive supramolecular nanofibers (supramolecular hydrogels) and enzymes enabled us to construct hydrogel materials capable of showing gel degradation (dis-assembly of supramolecular nanofibers) in response to a wide variety of biomolecules. We believe that our simple, but robust strategy and the relevant synthetic molecular tools could offer a variety of stimuli-responsive and bioinspired supramolecular soft materials. Figure 1