A General Protein Unfolding-Chemical Coupling Strategy for Pure Protein Hydrogels with Mechanically Strong and...

Protein-based hydrogels have attracted great attention due to their excellent biocompatible properties, but often suffer from weak mechanical strength. Conventional strengthening strategies for protein-based hydrogels are to introduce nanoparticles or synthetic polymers for improving their mechanical strength, but often compromise their biocompatibility. Here, a new, general, protein unfolding-chemical coupling (PNC) strategy is developed to fabricate pure protein hydrogels without any additives to achieve both high mechanical strength and excellent cell biocompatibility. This PNC strategy combines thermal-induced protein unfolding/gelation to form a physically-crosslinked network and a -NH2/-COOH coupling reaction to generate a chemicallycrosslinked network. Using bovine serum albumin (BSA) as a globular protein, PNC-BSA hydrogels show macroscopic transparency, high stability, high mechanical properties (compressive/tensile strength of 115/0.43 MPa), fast stiffness/toughness recovery of 85%/91% at room temperature, good fatigue resistance, and low cell cytotoxicity and red blood cell hemolysis. More importantly, the PNC strategy can be not only generally applied to silk fibroin, ovalbumin, and milk albumin protein to form different, high strength protein hydrogels, but also modified with PEDOT/PSS nanoparticles as strain sensors and fluorescent fillers as color sensors. This work demonstrates a new, universal, PNC method to prepare high strength, multi-functional, pure protein hydrogels beyond a few available today.