• Moench, Svenja
• Lemke, Phillip
• Niemeyer, Christof M.
• Domínguez, Carmen M.
• Jäger, Paula S.
• Oelschlaeger, Claude
• Rabe, Kersten S.

Abstract

The advent of biomedical applications of soft bioinspired materials hasentailed an increasing demand for streamlined and expedient characterizationmethods meant for both research and quality control objectives. Here, a novelmeasurement system for the characterization of biological hydrogels withvolumes as low as 75 μL was developed. The system is based on anindentation platform equipped with micrometer drive actuators that allow thedetermination of both the fracture points and Young’s moduli of relatively stiffpolymers, including agarose, as well as the measurements of viscosity forexceptionally soft and viscous hydrogels, such as DNA hydrogels. Thesensitivity of the method allows differentiation between DNA hydrogelsproduced by rolling circle amplification based on different template sequencesand synthesis protocols. In addition, the polymerization kinetics of thehydrogels can be determined by time-resolved measurements, and theapparent viscosities of even more complex DNA-based nanocomposites canbe measured. The platform presented here thus offers the possibility tocharacterize a broad variety of soft biomaterials in a targeted, fast, andcost-effective manner, holding promises for applications in fundamentalmaterials science and ensuring reproducibility in the handling of complexmaterials.

Topics

• nanocomposite
• impedance spectroscopy
• polymer
• viscosity
• biomaterials