Morphological and mechanical properties of tannic acid/PAAm semi-IPN hydrogels for cell adhesion

A series of hydrogels were fabricated from tannic acid (TA), a typical plant polyphenol widely present in wood, and polyacrylamide (PAAm) by semi-IPN and cryogelation techniques. The introduction of TA into the PAAm network endows the system with enhanced cell adhesion properties. The cryogels with open interconnected macropores had a superfast swelling rate and a high swelling ratio, as well as high elasticity in response to compression. The degradation of the hydrogels can be tuned by modulating the content of cross-linker poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate (PEGDA). Cytotoxicity results revealed that the hydrogels were non-toxic to COS-7 cells. All these results suggested that TA/PAAm semi-IPN hydrogels have great potential for applications in tissue engineering.