Engineering hydrogel viscoelastic mechanics via bio-inspired supramolecular metal-coordinate dynamics

Growing evidence supports a critical role of metal-coordinate supramolecular crosslinking in governing stimuli-responsive properties of soft biological materials. As such, bio-inspired metal-coordinate crosslinking provides unique opportunities to further our understanding of how to directly correlate macroscopic hydrogel mechanics with microscopic crosslink dynamics. Recent insights generated from such fundamental studies of metal-coordinate supramolecular chemo-mechanical couplings in hydrogels will be presented.