Shape morphing of hydrogels by harnessing enzyme enabled mechanoresponse

Reversible control of enzyme activity at the molecular level to control mechanical properties of hydrogels at the material level?

The authors Kuan Zhang, Yu Zhou, Junsheng Zhang, Qing Liu, Christina Hanenberg, Ahmend Mourran, Xing Wang, Xiang Gao, Andreas Herrmann and Lifei Zheng show in this article, published in Nature Communications, how they are able to create various 3D hydrogel objects by incorporating stiffening/softening bilayer units as hinges to drive the overall hydrogel transformation and thus precisely programming the shape-morphing behavior of hydrogels.

They anticipate that these results will pave the way for the development of self-regulating materials, which have potential applications in artificial muscles, soft robotics, and in vivo implants requiring tunable mechanical properties.