Peptide hydrogel with self-healing and redox-responsive properties

Areetha D'Souza; Liam R Marshall; Jennifer Yoon; Alona Kulesha; Dona I U Edirisinghe; Siddarth Chandrasekaran; Parth Rathee; Rajeev Prabhakar; Olga V Makhlynets

doi:10.1186/s40580-022-00309-7

Peptide hydrogel with self-healing and redox-responsive properties

Nano Converg. 2022 Apr 27;9(1):18. doi: 10.1186/s40580-022-00309-7.

Authors

Areetha D'Souza¹, Liam R Marshall¹, Jennifer Yoon¹, Alona Kulesha¹, Dona I U Edirisinghe¹, Siddarth Chandrasekaran², Parth Rathee³, Rajeev Prabhakar³, Olga V Makhlynets⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemistry, Syracuse University, 111 College Place, Syracuse, NY, 13244, USA.
² National Biomedical Center for Advanced ESR Technology, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14583, USA.
³ Department of Chemistry, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, 33146, USA.
⁴ Department of Chemistry, Syracuse University, 111 College Place, Syracuse, NY, 13244, USA. ovmakhly@syr.edu.

Abstract

We have rationally designed a peptide that assembles into a redox-responsive, antimicrobial metallohydrogel. The resulting self-healing material can be rapidly reduced by ascorbate under physiological conditions and demonstrates a remarkable 160-fold change in hydrogel stiffness upon reduction. We provide a computational model of the hydrogel, explaining why position of nitrogen in non-natural amino acid pyridyl-alanine results in drastically different gelation properties of peptides with metal ions. Given its antimicrobial and rheological properties, the newly designed hydrogel can be used for removable wound dressing application, addressing a major unmet need in clinical care.

Keywords: Antimicrobial wound dressing; Copper reduction; Hydrogel; Self-healing and redox-responsive properties.

Abstract

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