Reprinted with permissions from Nature Materials
A top and side view of the crystal lattices of the hydrogel shows the interdigitated biomolecular structure. Grey: carbon; red: oxygen; light blue: nitrogen; dark blue: oxygen of water molecules. The red dashed lines represent hydrogen-bonding networks.
Put a piece of DNA on a clean, DNAase-free piece of glass, and it will probably still be there in its original state hours later. Proteins, though, are much less forgiving. They require specific coddling to maintain their correct three-dimensional conformation and enzymatic activity, a quality that has hampered the development of protein microarrays. To counter this problem, a group of researchers developed a new substance that might provide an optimal surface for preparing "semi-wet" protein chips.1
Itaru Hamachi of the Institute for Materials Chemistry and Engineering at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, and colleagues developed a semi-wet protein array using a spontaneously generated supramolecular hydrogel. The ...
