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Rheological behavior of Pluronic/Pluronic diacrylate hydrogels used for bacteria encapsulation in engineered living materials.

Shardul BhusariMaxi HoffmannPetra Herbeck-EngelShrikrishnan SankaranManfred WilhelmAránzazu Del Campo
Published in: Soft matter (2024)
Pluronic (Plu) hydrogels mixed with variable fractions of Pluronic diacrylate (PluDA) have become popular matrices to encapsulate bacteria and control their growth in engineered living materials. Here we study the rheological response of 30 wt% Plu/PluDA hydrogels with PluDA fraction between 0 and 1. We quantify the range of viscoelastic properties that can be covered in this system by varying in the PluDA fraction. We present stress relaxation and creep-recovery experiments and describe the variation of the critical yield strain/stress, relaxation and recovery parameters of Plu/PluDA hydrogels as function of the covalent crosslinking degree using the Burgers and Weilbull models. The analyzed hydrogels present two stress relaxations with different timescales which can be tuned with the covalent crosslinking degree. We expect this study to help users of Plu/PluDA hydrogels to estimate the mechanical properties of their systems, and to correlate them with the behaviour of bacteria in future Plu/PluDA devices of similar composition.
Keyphrases
  • drug delivery
  • hyaluronic acid
  • drug release
  • extracellular matrix
  • tissue engineering
  • wound healing
  • stress induced
  • mass spectrometry
  • heat stress
  • atomic force microscopy