Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, 34141, Republic of Korea.
Division of Advanced Materials, Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology (KRICT), Daejeon, 34114, Republic of Korea.
Soft Matter. 2022 Jun 15;18(23):4402-4413. doi: 10.1039/d2sm00253a.
Curved hydrogel surfaces bearing chemical patterns are highly desirable in various applications, including artificial blood vessels, wearable electronics, and soft robotics. However, previous studies on the fabrication of chemical patterns on hydrogels employed two-photon lithography, which is still not widely accessible to most laboratories. This work demonstrates a new patterning technique for fabricating curved hydrogels with chemical patterns on their surfaces without two-photon microscopy. In this work, we show that exposing hydrogels in fluorophore solutions to single photons confocal microscopy enables the patterning of fluorophores on hydrogels. By applying this technique to highly stretchable hydrogels, we demonstrate three applications: (1) improving pattern resolution by fabricating patterns on stretched hydrogels and then returning the hydrogels to their initial, unstretched length; (2) modifying the local stretchability of hydrogels at a microscale resolution; and (3) fabricating perfusable microchannels with chemical patterns by winding chemically patterned hydrogels around a template, embedding the hydrogels in a second hydrogel, and then removing the template. The patterning method demonstrated in this work may facilitate a better mimicking of the physicochemical properties of organs in tissue engineering and may be used to make hydrogel robots with specific chemical functionalities.
具有化学图案的弯曲水凝胶表面在各种应用中非常理想，包括人工血管、可穿戴电子设备和软机器人。然而，以前关于水凝胶上化学图案的制造研究采用了双光子光刻技术，而大多数实验室仍然无法广泛使用该技术。这项工作展示了一种新的图案化技术，可在不使用双光子显微镜的情况下在水凝胶表面制造具有化学图案的弯曲水凝胶。在这项工作中，我们表明，将水凝胶暴露在荧光染料溶液中，用单光子共聚焦显微镜照射，可以在水凝胶上形成荧光染料的图案。通过将这项技术应用于高拉伸水凝胶，我们展示了三个应用：（1）通过在拉伸的水凝胶上制造图案，然后将水凝胶恢复到初始未拉伸的长度，来提高图案分辨率；（2）以微尺度分辨率改变水凝胶的局部拉伸性；（3）通过将化学图案化的水凝胶缠绕在模板上、将水凝胶嵌入第二个水凝胶中，然后去除模板，制造具有化学图案的可灌注微通道。本工作中展示的图案化方法可能有助于更好地模拟组织工程中器官的物理化学特性，并且可以用于制造具有特定化学功能的水凝胶机器人。
