Smart Hydrogels with Antibacterial Properties Built from All Natural Building Blocks

Smart hydrogels with multi-stimuli responsiveness have been increasingly exploited as soft matters for biomedical appli-cations in drug delivery, tissue engineering, and bioactuators. Whilst many of the effects have been well documented, the facile fabrication of multi-responsive hydrogels with specific functionality is met with profound challenges, particularly in the redundant synthesis of macromolecular building blocks and the integration of multiple dynamic linkages to construct hydrogel networks. To address this issue, herein we report a simple and rapid fabrication of smart hydrogels by direct gelation of all naturally occurring building blocks including aminoglycosides, protocatechualdehyde, and Fe(III) via two types of dynamic chemical bonds. The resulting smart hydrogels could perform excellent dynamic features and promis-ing multi-responsiveness to different stimuli including temperature, light, pH, redox, and electricity, and also exhibited high antibacterial activities. This study offers new o...