DNA hydrogels in bone tissue engineering: where molecular ingenuity meets skeletal renaissance

Bone tissue engineering is an emerging medical technology that utilizes scaffold materials to promote bone tissue regeneration and repair. Current scaffolds include biodegradable porous polymers, inorganic ceramics, and growth factors, but they face limitations such as difficulty in maintaining long-term biological activity in vivo and restricted applications. DNA hydrogels, composed of natural polymer chains and small molecules, exhibit excellent biocompatibility, biodegradability, bioactivity, high mechanical strength, and low toxicity. They have been applied in tissue repair, particularly in bone regeneration, serving as cell scaffolds, guiding tissue regeneration, and enabling gene therapy. This review summarizes recent advances in DNA hydrogels for bone repair, outlines their fabrication methods and performance characteristics, discusses applications involving growth factors, bone defect repair, bone regeneration, drug delivery, and organoid development, and explores their integration with 3D/4D/5D/6D printing, big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, precision manufacturing, and automation. Despite existing challenges, DNA hydrogels offer new insights into bone tissue engineering due to their programmability and superior biological properties, and hold great promise as a key tool in bone repair.