Although hydrogels have been of both scientific and technical interest for a very long time, research into these compounds is very far from complete. Indeed, we can witness widespread research efforts to upgrade hydrogels into ever more sophisticated materials, with synthetic and physical chemists striving to make hydrogel structures and properties ever more complex and more ingenious (De France et al., 2018; Raghuwanshi and Garnier, 2019). Modern researchers are trying to make hydrogels more and more similar to materials found in biological bodies, with the aim of enabling such hydrogels to effectively mimic their bio-counterparts and thereby become available for increasingly advanced use in medicine (Du et al., 2015; Gharazi et al., 2018; Klotz et al., 2018; Li et al., 2018; Rosenberg et al., 2019; Xie et al., 2019). However, hydrogel applications are not limited to their traditional areas – the food and pharma industries – as they find use either directly as materials with specific properties or indirectly as templates for other products [see, for example, Zhou et al. (2019)].
The articles covering this research topic represent only a small window on contemporary research and development in the field of hydrogels. They are short pieces illustrating the whole mosaic with a special focus on bio-based materials, and report, for example, on progress in the development of self-healing hydrogels or bio-inks designed for the 3D printing of hydrogels for application in tissue engineering, as well as on experience with cell differentiation in relation to hydrogel stiffness and the potential application of hydrogels in the treatment of aneurysms.
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Author contributions
All authors listed have made a substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
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Summary
Keywords
editorial, biopolymer, biomaterial, cross-linked material, hydrogels 1
Citation
Pekař M (2020) Editorial: Biopolymer-Based Hydrogels – Ubiquitous and Prospective Materials. Front. Mater. 7:586526. doi: 10.3389/fmats.2020.586526
Received
23 July 2020
Accepted
24 August 2020
Published
14 September 2020
Volume
7 - 2020
Edited by
Dayang Wang, RMIT University, Australia
Updates
Copyright
© 2020 Pekař.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Miloslav Pekař, pekar@fch.vut.cz
This article was submitted to Colloidal, Materials, and Interfaces, a section of the journal Frontiers in Materials
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