手性水凝胶是新近涌现的一个研究领域,以其独特的手性响应性,可逆的吸收膨胀性能,在手性识别、手性分离、药物控制释放和微流控器件等方面均具有广泛的应用前景.因此,手性水凝胶已经成为近些年来材料科学、化学、生物医学等领域的研究热点,如何制备手性响应性好、形成过程可控、结构规整的水凝胶,并加以开发应用成为了研究中的重点.本文概述了手性水凝胶的制备方法,自组装机理,以及目前的应用状况,并展望了其未来的发展趋势.
Smart hydrogels are one kind of soft materials adopting water as the dispersion medium,which could respond to the external changes in the surrounding environment,such as temperature,pH value,pressure,solvent,light or electric/magnetic field,and further induce reversibly continuous or discontinuous volume phase transitions by absorbing or squeezing several-fold water out of themselves.In recent years,chiral hydrogel emerges as a new research field and will find broad applications in chiral recognition,enantiomeric separation,controlled drug release and microfluid devices,which have become one of the research focuses in the interdisciplinary fields among material sciences,chemistry and biomedicines.However,how to obtain chiral hydrogels with sensitive and accurate responsiveness,well-defined nano-and micro-structures,as well as the controllable formation process,have become the critical points of research.In this review,recent progresses in chiral hydrogels are summarized,including various preparation methods to construct polymer hydrogels with three-dimensional network structures or small molecular hydrogels with helical structures,as well as some vagarious gel formation process in which chirality is transferred from singular molecules to nanoscale architectures and macroscopic behavior of hydrogels.Finally,the applications and tendency of future development of these materials are introduced.