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. 2018 Dec 29;6:35. doi: 10.1186/s41038-018-0138-8

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© The Author(s) 2018

Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

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Fig. 3 — Thiol-disulfide exchange reaction based hydrogels formation and theirs dissolution. a Thiol-disulfide exchange reaction. Figure is adapted with permission from the original articles of Houk and Whitesides [43] (Copyright 1987 by Amerian Chemical Society). b Reaction scheme for hydrogel preparation and its reliquefaction. Figure is adapted with permission from the original articles of Hisano et al. [45] (Copyright 1988 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.). c Schematic representation of thiopyridyl terminations appended on the 8-arm-poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG)-SH to form 8-arm-PEG-S-TP. Thiopyridine is a good leaving group and the 8-arm-PEG-S-TP forms disulfide bridges with the 8-arm-PEG-SH in phosphate buffer (PB) (pH 8) resulting in S-TP hydrogels [47]. d Schematic of the reversible nature of hydrogels. Glutathione (GSH) acts as a thiolate moiety and attacks the disulfide bonds resulting in the breakdown of the hydrogel network (gel to sol transition). The possible products are 8-arm-PEG-SH, 8-arm-PEG-(SH)-S-SG, 8-arm-PEG-S-SG and GS-SG. Figures are adapted with permission from the original articles of Anumolu et al. [47].(Copyright 2010 by Elsevier Ltd.)