Electrically Conducting Hydrogel Graphene Nanocomposite Biofibers for Biomedical Applications

Sepehr Talebian; Mehdi Mehrali; Raad Raad; Farzad Safaei; Jiangtao Xi; Zhoufeng Liu; Javad Foroughi

doi:10.3389/fchem.2020.00088

Electrically Conducting Hydrogel Graphene Nanocomposite Biofibers for Biomedical Applications

Front Chem. 2020 Feb 27:8:88. doi: 10.3389/fchem.2020.00088. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Sepehr Talebian^{1

2}, Mehdi Mehrali³, Raad Raad⁴, Farzad Safaei⁴, Jiangtao Xi⁴, Zhoufeng Liu⁵, Javad Foroughi^{1

2

4}

Affiliations

¹ Intelligent Polymer Research Institute, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia.
² Illawarra Health and Medical Research Institute, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia.
³ Department of Mechanical Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark.
⁴ School of Electrical, Computer and Telecommunications Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia.
⁵ School of Textile Engineering, Zhongyuan University of Technology, Zhengzhou, China.

Abstract

Conductive biomaterials have recently gained much attention, specifically owing to their application for electrical stimulation of electrically excitable cells. Herein, flexible, electrically conducting, robust fibers composed of both an alginate biopolymer and graphene components have been produced using a wet-spinning process. These nanocomposite fibers showed better mechanical, electrical, and electrochemical properties than did single fibers that were made solely from alginate. Furthermore, with the aim of evaluating the response of biological entities to these novel nanocomposite biofibers, in vitro studies were carried out using C2C12 myoblast cell lines. The obtained results from in vitro studies indicated that the developed electrically conducting biofibers are biocompatible to living cells. The developed hybrid conductive biofibers are likely to find applications as 3D scaffolding materials for tissue engineering applications.

Keywords: biofibers; biopolymer; electrically conductive hydrogel; graphene; hydrogel; nanocomposite; wet spinning.