Responsive Hyaluronic Acid–Ethylacrylamide Microgels Fabricated Using Microfluidics Technique

Autor: Marcus Wanselius, Agnes Rodler, Sean S. Searle, Susanna Abrahmsén-Alami, Per Hansson
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2022
Předmět:
Zdroj: Gels, Vol 8, Iss 9, p 588 (2022)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 2310-2861
DOI: 10.3390/gels8090588
Popis: Volume changes of responsive microgels can probe interactions between polyelectrolytes and species of opposite charges such as peptides and proteins. We have investigated a microfluidics method to synthesize highly responsive, covalently crosslinked, hyaluronic acid microgels for such purposes. Sodium hyaluronate (HA), pre-modified with ethylacrylamide functionalities, was crosslinked in aqueous droplets created with a microfluidic technique. We varied the microgel properties by changing the degree of modification and concentration of HA in the reaction mixture. The degree of modification was determined by 1H NMR. Light microscopy was used to investigate the responsiveness of the microgels to osmotic stress in aqueous saline solutions by simultaneously monitoring individual microgel species in hydrodynamic traps. The permeability of the microgels to FITC-dextrans of molecular weights between 4 and 250 kDa was investigated using confocal laser scanning microscopy. The results show that the microgels were spherical with diameters between 100 and 500 µm and the responsivity tunable by changing the degree of modification and the HA concentration. Microgels were fully permeable to all investigated FITC-dextran probes. The partitioning to the microgel from an aqueous solution decreased with the increasing molecular weight of the probe, which is in qualitative agreement with theories of homogeneous gel networks.
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