Calcium-ion-driving assembly of polysaccharide deriving from Zizyphus jujuba to hemostatic hydrogel for treating diabetic wound.

Due to good biocompatibility and biodegradable, natural polysaccharide-based hydrogels have received worldwide attentions, where polysaccharide polymers were usually chemically modified to meet the specific elastic requirements. However, it remained highly challenging to develop polysaccharide-based hydrogels with desired mechanical properties and biological functions devoid of any structural modifications. Herein, with the coordination of Ca (15.0 mM), the jujuba polysaccharide (JPS, 1 %) was facilely fabricated to a hydrogel (JPS-gel) within 1 min at pH 10, where the residual proteins also played crucial roles on the assembly. The JPS-gel showed outstanding stability and mechanical properties, which were tunable by adjusting the content of Ca/JPS. The JPS-gel also revealed excellent biocompatibility, and could expedite the migration and proliferation of healing-related cells, angiogenesis and alleviate inflammation response. More interestingly, the JPS-gel had hemostatic capacity, where the hemostatic time and blood loss in liver incision model were 13 ± 3 s and 6.3 ± 1.6 mg after 120 s treatment with JPS-gel, respectively. All these superiorities endowed JPS-gel high performance healing in diabetic wounds (10 days). Specially, the expressions of inflammation-related genes were downregulated, but gene expressions associated with cell migration and proliferation, and angiogenesis were upregulated, thus uncovering the action mechanism of JPS-gel on accelerating wound contraction.