Development of Polyamidoamine Hydrogels: towards New Stimuli-Responsive Materials

In the field of materials science, stimuli-responsive hydrogels are one of the most used and promising systems for a wide range of applications, such as supercapacitators, sensors, batteries or drug delivery systems. The main attractive feature is the possibility to have a fine tuning of the chemical and mechanical properties after an alteration of the surrounding environment, such as temperature, pH or light irradiation. In this contribution, we will show different methods for the preparation of novel stimuli-responsive hydrogel based on an initiator-free polyamidoamine network formed through aza-Micheal reaction of methylene-bis-acrylamide (MBA) and ?-aminobutyric acid (GABA) with pentaethylenehexamine (PEHA) recently reported. The synthesis and characterization of a light-ROS responsive hydrogel, in which the light-harvesting fullerene moieties promotes an alteration of the hydrophilic/hydrophobic properties of the gel through selective sulfur oxidation of methionine side chains and the development of conductive hydrogels, obtained from the polymerization of a conductive polymer inside the pre-existing hydrogel matrix, will be presented and discussed.