Miloslav Pekař*Editorial on the Research Topic
Biopolymer-Based Hydrogels – Ubiquitous and Prospective Materials
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.
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.
References
De France, K. J., Xu, F., and Hoare, T. (2018). Structured macroporous hydrogels: progress, challenges, and opportunities. Adv. Healthcare Mater. 7, 1700927. doi:10.1002/adhm.201700927
Du, X., Zhou, J., Shi, J., and Xu, B. (2015). Supramolecular hydrogelators and hydrogels: from soft matter to molecular biomaterials. Chem. Rev. 115, 13165–13307. doi:10.1021/acs.chemrev.5b00299
Gharazi, S., Zarket, B. C., DeMella, K. C., and Raghavan, S. R. (2018). Nature-inspired hydrogels with soft and stiff zones that exhibit a 100-fold difference in elastic modulus. ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 10, 34664–34673. doi:10.1021/acsami.8b14126
Li, Q., Ning, Z., Ren, J., Liao, W., Vallmajo-Martin, Q., Clevers, H., et al. (2018). Structural design and physicochemical foundations of hydrogels for biomedical applications. Curr. Med. Chem. 25, 963–981. doi:10.2174/0929867324666170818111630
Raghuwanshi, V. S., and Garnier, G. (2019). Characterisation of hydrogels: Linking the nano to the microscale. Adv. Colloid Interface Sci. 274, 102044. doi:10.1016/j.cis.2019.102044
Klotz, B. J., Oosterhoff, J., Utomo, L., Lim, K. S., Vallmajo-Martin, Q., Clevers, H. et al. (2019). Versatile biosynthetic hydrogel platform for engineering of tissue analogues. Adv. Healthc. Mater. 8, e1900979. doi:10.1002/adhm.201900979
Xie, R., Zheng, W., Guan, L., Ai, Y., and Liang, Q. (2019). Engineering of hydrogel materials with perfusable microchannels for building vascularized tissues. Small 16, 1902838. doi:10.1002/smll.201902838
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.
Edited by:
Dayang Wang, RMIT University, AustraliaCopyright © 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