Hydrogel containing polymeric supports

An appropriate gel should be chemically inert, transparent and have satisfactory mechanical properties. Polyacrylamide gel was successfully used for the study of sustained excitation waves [47, 48] in the Belousov-Zhabotinsky medium. It was retained as a support for the reaction medium in our initial search for symmetry breaking patterns in the CIMA reaction. For this purpose, the gel was initially loaded with a soluble starch - we used Thiod ne, an iodine color indicator from Prolabo which contains only 7% starch [65] the excipient was washed out of the gel prior to any experiment. Starch is a macromolecule (> 200 000 Daltons) which remains immobilized in the polymeric matrix of the gel. Our polyacrylamide gel was a soft hydrogel (5% dry material) with an average pore size of 80 A. 

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