Active Modulation of States of Prestress in Self-Assembled Short Peptide Gels.

ABSTRACT: Peptide hydrogels are excellent candidates for medical therapeutics due to their tuneable viscoelastic properties, however, in vivo they will be subject to various osmotic pressures, temperature changes, and biological co-solutes, which could alter their performance. Peptide hydrogels formed from the synthetic peptide I₃K have a temperature-induced hardening of their shear modulus by a factor of 2. We show that the addition of uncross-linked poly( N-isopropylacrylamide) chains to the peptide gels increases the gels' temperature sensitivity by 3 orders of magnitude through the control of osmotic swelling and cross-linking. Using machine learning combined with single-molecule fluorescence microscopy, we measured the modulation of states of prestress in the gels on the level of sin

SUBMITTER: Cox H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6492955 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature