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EDITORIAL article

Front. Mater., 14 September 2020
Sec. Colloidal Materials and Interfaces
This article is part of the Research Topic Bio-polymer Based Hydrogels – Ubiquitous and Prospective Materials View all 5 articles

Editorial: Biopolymer-Based Hydrogels – Ubiquitous and Prospective Materials

Miloslav Peka&#x;
Miloslav Pekař*
  • Faculty of Chemistry, Brno University of Technology, Brno, Czechia

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

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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, Australia

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

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.