Fine-tuning the mechanical and degradation properties of chemically crosslinked hyaluronic acid hydrogels through salt treatment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study proposes a novel method to fine-tune hyaluronic acid (HA) hydrogel properties by incorporating salt into the HA solution prior to crosslinking. The salt is hypothesized to influence HA chain conformation and HA-HA interactions mainly through the Hofmeister effect and electrostatic interactions, thereby affecting HA degree of modification (DoM), degree of crosslinking (DoCr), and chain arrangement within the hydrogel network. These changes become fixed upon crosslinking, resulting in stable modifications persisting after salt removal. To verify this, HA solutions (5 % w/v) were crosslinked with 1,4-butanediol diglycidal ether (BDDE) after adding a sodium salt from the Hofmeister series (sodium citrate, sodium sulfate, or sodium chloride; 0-0.67 M). Following crosslinking and salt removal, the hydrogels were characterized using NMR, swelling, rheological, and degradation tests. Results demonstrated that salt treatment influenced swelling ratio, mechanical properties, and degradation rates, with changes depending on salt type and concentration. NMR analysis confirmed that salts did not directly participate in crosslinking but affected DoM and DoCr. Changes in hydrogel properties were primarily driven by DoM alterations, with potential contributions from non-covalent interactions and modified HA chain arrangement. This salt treatment technique may enable designing hydrogels with unique properties not achievable by simple changes in crosslinker concentration.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".