An Injectable Hydrogel of Kappa-Carrageenan- Do-pamine Functionalized Graphene Oxide with Shear-Thin-ning and Mechanically Robust Characteristics for Soft Tis-sue Engineering

Background: Recently there is a wide range of request for tissue transplantation and lack of immune sources stimulates researchers to recreate organs from natural materials. meth-acrylate-Kappa-carrageenan (KaMA) has been proposed as a suitable network, which can be able to crosslinked ionically and chemically. Mechanical and physical tunable properties of crosslinked hydrogel is unique factor for crosslinked hydrogels to mimicking target soft tissue Materials and Methods: Kappa-carrageenan was methacrylated with 4%v/v degree and was crosslinked through a chemi-cal and physical process with UV light and KCl respectively. Moreover different percentages of dopamine functionalized graphene oxide was initially added to primary hydrogel solu-tion.Results: Graphene oxide-functionalized with polydopamine (PD) seems to be promising additive to structure KaMA, that can enhance shear thinning behavior of hydrogel through in-teraction of active catechol group belonging to PD with other moieties in structure of hydrogels. In addition we claimed that these interaction also promote mechanical properties of hydro-gels after crosslinking. In our find, encapsulation of 20wt % GOPD enhanced toughness (6-folds) and compressive strength (8-folds) prominently. Moreover, with the presence of these secondary bonds, this hydrogel can be considered as a self-healable hydrogel due to recreation the broken bonds. The in-corporation of GOPD significantly improved swelling ration and decrease degradation rate, while with increasing amount of GOPD cell behavior were influenced, cell attachment and spreading promoted Conclusion: KaMA-GOPD hydrogel can be used to deliver cells and biological molecules through the injection process and presented as suitable biomaterial ink for 3 Dbioproiting.

Keywords:

Shear Thinning , Self-Healing , Nanocomposite Hy-drogels , Dopamine , Kappa-Carrageenan