Smart Hydrogels: From Rational Design to Applications

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue on “Smart Hydrogels: From Rational Design to Applications” is focuses on fundamental aspects and recent developments in rational design, synthesis, characterization, self-assembly mechanism, and applications of hydrogels in the chemical and biological field.

Smart hydrogels are an important class of soft materials with a three-dimensional polymer network in which a large amount of water is entrapped. Interestingly, in the presence of physical stimuli such as heat, light, electric field, magnetic field, and chemical stimuli such as pH, enzymes, redox, ions, etc., these smart hydrogels change their physiochemical properties such as transparency or color, phase behavior, conductivity, and shape or rheological properties. In the last few decades, smart hydrogels have been at the forefront of advanced materials because of their outstanding applications in sensors, programmable drug delivery, actuators, and tissue engineering. Smart hydrogels can be prepared by rational design of appropriate peptide sequences, composite material with the help of extracellular matrix (ECM) proteins, biologically suitable polymer, collagen-like peptide (CLP), etc. In addition, the self-assembly propensity of these smart hydrogels to form nanoscale architecture plays an important role in biomedical applications.

It is incredibly important to cover all aspects of smart hydrogels in one issue, and this Special Issue will cover a few representative examples, also including review articles of recent findings (preferably within last 5 years) explaining the progress in this advanced field with the aim of helping scientists worldwide. Computational science related to smart hydrogels is also welcomed in this Special Issue.

Dr. Bapan Pramanik
Dr. Lucy Vojtová
Guest Editors

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