Spatiotemporal mapping of cascading processes in oligonucleotide-functionalized responsive hydrogels

Abstract

Hydrogels – crosslinked polymer networks holding a large amount of water – have many properties that make them useful for medical applications, such as their resemblance to biological tissues, biocompatibility and biodegradability. So-called responsive hydrogels are also able to change their properties in response to a change in their surroundings. Some of their potential applications include manufacturing of sensors, delivering drugs to a specific location in the body, or serving as scaffolds for tissue engineering. The aim of the thesis was to investigate the processes that lead to swelling of oligonucleotide-functionalized hydrogels which respond to the presence of a target DNA or other oligonucleotide. An understanding of these processes and how changing one affects the rest is important in order to be able to adjust the hydrogels to their intended applications. The swelling of the hydrogels and the transport of the DNA within them were observed using interferometry. Then the binding strength of the target to the network was varied to investigate how the transport and the overall swelling are affected.