A general route to strong, conductive and antibacterial curdlan-based purely natural eutectohydrogels with self-assembled layer-by-layer network structure.

To promote the application extension of curdlan from food industry- dominant to advanced flexible biomaterials, a novel group of purely natural curdlan gels with noticeable performance was developed through a simple heating-cooling approach, i.e., heating the dispersion of pristine curdlan in mixed acidic natural deep eutectic solvents (NADESs) and water at 60-90 °C, and cooling at ambient temperature.

Strain-sensitive alginate/polyvinyl alcohol composite hydrogels with Janus hierarchy and conductivity mediated by tannic acid.

To construct conductive hydrogels with a conductive and a non- or weakly conductive layer for comfortable and safe electronic application, marine biobased anionic polysaccharide sodium alginate (SA) and neutral polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) were employed as the hydrogel matrixes. Tannic acid (TA) was exploited to mediate the demixing of the miscible aqueous solution of SA and PVA in view of the much larger interaction strength of TA with PVA than both of TA with SA and PVA with SA calculated from the density functional theory (-40.21, -29.

Advances in versatile anti-swelling polymer hydrogels.

Swelling is ubiquitous for traditional as-prepared hydrogels, but is unfavorable in many situations, especially biomedical applications, such as tissue engineering, internal wound closure, soft actuating and bioelectronics, and so forth. As the swelling of a hydrogel usually leads to a volume expansion, which not only deteriorates the mechanical property of the hydrogel but can bring about undesirable oppression on the surrounding tissues when applied in vivo. In contrast, anti-swelling hydrogels hardly alter their volume when applied in aqueous environment, therefore reserving the original mechanical performance and size-stability and facilitating their potential application.

Synthesis and biological evaluation of novel bisheterocycle-containing compounds as potential anti-influenza virus agents.

A series of novel 4,2-bisheterocycle tandem derivatives consisting of a methyloxazole and thiazole subunit were synthesized. Many compounds were found to inhibit human influenza A virus. Several analogues exhibited moderate biological activity and could serve as leads for further optimizations for antivirus research.