Taking advantage of their thixotropic behavior, microporosity, and modular properties, granular hydrogels formed from jammed hydrogel microparticles have emerged as an exciting class of soft, injectable materials useful for numerous applications, ranging from the production of biomedical scaffolds for tissue repair to the therapeutic delivery of drugs and cells. Recently, the annealing of hydrogel microparticles in situ to yield a porous bulk scaffold has shown numerous benefits in regenerative medicine, including tissue-repair applications. Current annealing techniques, however, mainly rely either on covalent connections, which produce static scaffolds, or transient supramolecular interactions, which produce dynamic but mechanically weak hydrogels. To address these limitations, we developed microgels functionalized with peptides inspired by the histidine-rich cross-linking domains of marine mussel byssus proteins. Functionalized microgels can reversibly aggregate in situ via metal coordination cross-linking to form microporous, self-healing, and resilient scaffolds at physiological conditions by inclusion of minimal amounts of zinc ions at basic pH. Aggregated granular hydrogels can subsequently be dissociated in the presence of a metal chelator or under acidic conditions. Based on the demonstrated cytocompatibility of these annealed granular hydrogel scaffolds, we believe that these materials could be developed toward applications in regenerative medicine and tissue engineering.
Keywords: annealed microgels; cell scaffold; granular hydrogels; histidine; metal coordination; mussel-inspired.