Molecular hydrogel

Yang ZM, Liang GL, Ma ML et al (2007) Conjugates of naphthalene and dipeptides produce molecular hydrogelators with high efficiency of hydrogelation and superhelical nanofihers. J Mater Chem 17 850-854... 

Similarly, fluorescent silver clusters could be prepared in so called molecular hydrogels, formed by polyglycerol-b/oc -poly(acrylic acid) (PG-b-PAA), using a ratio COOH Ag of 2 1 with UV irradiation (365 nm). The emission band centered at 590 nm reached a maximum after 200 min of irradiation. The authors claim improved photostability of the clusters since they are still luminescent even after 9 h of irradiation, but it has to be mentioned that the irradiation source was weak, only 0.5 mW/cm2. They claim that it is the number of arms in the star polymer rather than the length of the arms (thus the density of COOH) that plays a crucial role in the formation of silver clusters [30]. 

Shen Z, Duan H, Frey H (2007) Water-soluble fluorescent ag nanoclusters obtained from multiarm star poly(acrylic acid) as molecular hydrogel templates. Adv Mater 19 349-352... 

Wang, Q., Yang, Z., Wang, L., Ma, M., Xu, B., 2007. Molecular hydrogel-immobilized enzymes exhibit superactivity and high stability in organic solvents. Chem. Commun. 10, 1032-1034. 

While most molecular gels have been made in organic solvents, molecular organogel by default is not compatible with the aqueous in vivo environment. This review therefore focuses mainly on apphcations of molecular hydrogel in tissue engineering, and readers are referred to a recent review on the apphcations of molecular organogel [30]. 

Mitra, R. and Das, P. 2008. In-situ preparation of gold nanoparticles of varying shape in molecular hydrogel of peptide amphiphiles. /. Phys. Chem. C 112 8159-8166. 

Knowledge of the network parameters is important for understanding gelation processes, and relationships between the molecular structure and hydrogel synthesis conditions. The principles for the optimization of SAH characteristics for various application purposes can also be based on these parameters. 

To determine the crosslinking density from the equilibrium elastic modulus, Eq. (3.5) or some of its modifications are used. For example, this analysis has been performed for the PA Am-based hydrogels, both neutral [18] and polyelectrolyte [19,22,42,120,121]. For gels obtained by free-radical copolymerization, the network densities determined experimentally have been correlated with values calculated from the initial concentration of crosslinker. Figure 1 shows that the experimental molecular weight between crosslinks considerably exceeds the expected value in a wide range of monomer and crosslinker concentrations. These results as well as other data [19, 22, 42] point to various imperfections of the PAAm network structure. 

As a polycation, chitosan spontaneously forms macromolecular complexes upon reaction with anionic polyelectrolytes. These complexes are generally water-insoluble and form hydrogels [90,91]. A variety of polyelectrolytes can be obtained by changing the chemical structure of component polymers, such as molecular weight, flexibility, fimctional group structure, charge density, hydrophilicity and hydrophobicity, stereoregularity, and compatibility, as... 

Polymer composites of mbber-hydrogel are permeable for water-soluble low-molecular weight compounds in a swollen state. Therefore, it is suitable for dmg delivery carrier. Many papers have researched the basic role of composite morphology in low-molecular weight component transport through two-phase composites where only one phase played the main role. 

It has been demonstrated that a variety of different polyphosphazenes can be developed as biomaterials, membranes or hydrogels, bioactive polymers, and bioerodible polymers. As with most new areas of polymer chemistry and biomaterials science, molecular design forms the basis of most new advances, but the rate-controlling step is the testing and evaluation of the materials in both in vitro and in vivo environments. This is particularly true for polyphosphazenes where the availability of research quantities only has limited the... 

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