Instructive hydrogels

Gao Y, Kuang Y, Guo ZE, Guo Z, Krauss IJ, Xu B (2009) Enzyme-instructed self-assembly confers nanofibers and a supramolecular hydrogel of taxol derivative. J Am Chem Soc 131 13576-13577... 

Beyond such production of gels, the next level of complexity is to introduce biochemical instructions to enhance and support specific cell behavior. Cellular behavior is known to be responsive to a triad of material cues, which are (i) chemical, (ii) mechanical, and (iii) topographical." Gels from supramolecular fibers based on peptides can, in principle, be designed with control of each of these cues. In terms of chemical information, hydrogels can incorporate bioactive peptides, such as the well-known cell binding RGD sequence, as presented by the natural ECM. Material stiffness has been proven to be a crucial parameter, especially for stem cell culture. It has been demonstrated that stem cells can be influenced to differentiate to... 

The fabrication of engineered hydrogels that mimic the invasive characteristics of native provisional extracellular matrices with controllable degradation rate holds great promise in the development of new smart instructive materials (Hu et al., 2012 HubbeU, 1999 Lutolf et al., 2003b). It is important to note that the control of 3D cell migration within a biomaterial plays a critical role in TE (Ulijn et al., 2007). Insufficient cell migration in a scaffold is a major limitation in the formation of complex TE constructs. Thus, the... 

Guvendiren, M., Burdick, J.A. Engineering synthetic hydrogel microenvironments to instruct stem ceUs. Curr. Opin. Biotechnol. 24, 841-846 (2013)... 

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