Synthesis And Characterization Of Novel Luminous Hydrogels

In recent years,tissue engineering is widely used in biological tissue regeneration and reconstruction.Among all the biomaterials,hydrogels have become one of the most popular candidate materials in tissue engineering because of their structural similarity with natural extracellular matrix,inherent biocompatibility,adjustable viscoelasticity,high water content and high permeability.However,it's hard to monitor the metabolism,displacement,deformation and fragmentation in situ of the transplantation in vitro and in vivo culture.Therefore,it is very important to for tissue engineering scaffolds with identifiability.Among various luminous materials,europium organic complexes have become particularly attractive for their growing use in biomedical and optical communication fields due to their predominant photophysical properties such as large Stokes shifts,long luminescence lifetimes and sharp emission peak.However,it is difficult for most of the rare earth complexes to combine with a hydrophilic material due to their low solubility in water.Therefore,it is a challenge to introduce the rare earth complexes into the hydrogels.In this paper,we have synthesized two kinds of novel luminous hydrogels through molecular engineering approaches.The first hydrogel we prepared displayed high transparency,excellent fluorescence properties under UV irradiation,good mechanical and self-healing properties.10Eu-PVA hydrogel(Eu-PVA/PVA containing is 10 wt%,boric acid containing is 1.5 wt%)could afford a 500 g weight without any deformation,and it could self-heal in 6 h,moreover,the MC3T3-E1 cells had good living state on the surface of the hydrogels.The second hydrogel we prepared consisted of hydrogen bonding interactions,physical crystallization,and hydrophobic interactions.The hydrogel exhibited outstanding mechanical properties with high tensile strain up to 422.55%,excellent compressive stress of 2.00 MPa,good toughness of 67.86 MJ/m~3,what's more,the hydrogel could bear car pressure without any deformation.The good luminescence of Eu(III)made the hydrogel a better identifiability that could emit strong red light through the chicken skin under 385 nm UV light.