Double network (DN) gels are anomalously robust but soft and wet materials, whose maximum stress in compression reaches 30MPa and surface friction coefficient reaches 0.001 simultaneously. The DN gels also have shock absorbency, permeability, and biocompatibility. Thus it is expected that the DN gels will be applied to artificial joints, artificial cartilages, and artificial blood vessels. In t...

We have further characterized the sensitivity and specificity of SYPRO Orange protein gel stain and SYPRO Red protein gel stain with native and 2-dimensional polyacrylamide gels and for staining gels prior to Western blot analysis. We found that nucleic acids are not stained by the SYPRO protein gel stains, in contrast to results obtained with commonly used silver staining techniques. Bacterial...

The fractal structure of the aggregates in food protein gels was analyzed. Three kinds of food protein gels were prepared: (1) β-lactoglobulin (β-LG) gel; (2) 11S soybean globulin gel; and (3) caseinate gel. From the concentration dependence of the gel elasticity, the fractal dimensions Df of the aggregates in the gels were evaluated, according to the theory of Shih et al. These gels showed the...

Gels of low molecular weight gelators (LMWGs) are self-assembled, thermoreversible, viscoelastic materials which can also be rendered sensitive to light, pH or chemical substances by simple chemical modifications. In addition, the ability of some of these LMWGs to gelate water (hydrogelators) makes these gels interesting, new materials for drug delivery applications. In this paper, for the firs...

Due to their porous structure, aqueous environment and dietary fiber nature arabinoxylan (AX) gels could have potential applications for colon-specific therapeutic molecule delivery. In addition, prebiotic and health related effects of AX have been previously demonstrated. It has been also reported that cross-linked AX can be degraded by bacteria from the intestinal microbiota. However, AX gels...

This study developed a digital volume correlation (DVC) algorithm based on fast normalized cross-correlation to measure the 3-dimensional deformation of soft gels, which was further utilized as a force sensor for cell mechanics studies. The developed algorithm was applied to the 3-D volume images of a gel acquired by confocal microscope to measure the deformation of the gel. The gel contained u...

We report the effect of flow-induced dynamical heterogeneity on the nonlinear elastic modulus of weakly aggregated colloidal gels that have undergone yielding by an imposed step strain deformation. The gels are comprised of sterically stabilized poly(methyl methacrylate) colloids interacting through short-ranged depletion attractions. When a step strain of magnitude varying from γ = 0.1 to 80.0...

An 80-membered library of gels composed of monofunctional 2-ethyl-2-oxazoline and 2-nonyl-2-oxazoline and one of four selected difunctional 2-oxazolines (containing either ether or ester bonds) were synthesized by microwave-assisted ring-opening polymerizations. The difunctional 2-oxazolines were prepared from the thiol-ene reaction of glycol dimercaptoacetate or 2,2'-(ethylenedioxy)diethanethi...

Introduction Stimuli-responsive gels undergo abrupt changes in volume in response to environmental changes such as pH and temperature. Stimuli-responsive gels have attracted considerable attention as smart materials in the biochemical and biomedical fields, since they can sense environmental changes and induce structural changes by themselves. The fascinating properties of such stimuli-responsi...

The effect of mixing on the properties of agar gels was investigated with consideration being given to both macrostructural and microstructural characteristics of the gel through rheological techniques that include conventional and ultrasound based methods and Differential Scanning Calorimetry. Agar gels of 1 and 3% concentrations were prepared. The gels were subjected to three different mixing...