Recently, Ph.D. student Dong Yuqing from BEBC has published his first
author paper in International Journal of ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces
entitled "Engineering Cell Microenvironment using Novel Photo-responsive
Hydrogels ".
Graphical Abstract
In
vivo, cells are located in a dynamic, three-dimensional (3D) cell microenvironment,
and various biomaterials have been used to engineer 3D cell microenvironments in vitro to study the effects of the cell
microenvironment on the regulation of cell fate. However, conventional
hydrogels can only mimic the static cell microenvironment without any
synchronous regulations. Therefore, novel hydrogels that are capable of
responding to specific stimuli (e.g.,
light, temperature, pH, and magnetic and electrical stimulations) have emerged
as versatile platforms to precisely mimic the dynamic native 3D cell
microenvironment. Among these novel hydrogels, photo-responsive hydrogels
(PRHs) that are capable of changing their physical and chemical properties
after exposure to light irradiation enable the dynamic, native cell
microenvironment to be mimicked and show great promise in deciphering the
unknown mechanisms of the 3D cell microenvironment in regulating cell fate.
Several reviews have already summarized the advances of PRHs and focused on
specific photosensitive chemical groups and photo-responsive elements or on the
reaction categories and mechanism of PRHs. However, a holistic view of novel
PRHs that highlights the multiple physical and chemical properties that can be tuned
by remote light activation, as well as their applications in engineering a dynamic
cell microenvironment for the regulation of cell behaviors in vitro, is still
missing and is the focus of this review.
The
work is under the guidance of Dr. Min Lin and Dr. Guorui Jin. The co-authors of
the paper include Yuan
Hong, Hongyuan Zhu, Dr. Dan Bai, Prof. Tian
Jian Lu and Prof. Feng Xu.