Thermally Assisted Microfluidics to Produce Chemically Equivalent Microgels with Tunable Network Morphologies

Although micron-sized microgels have become important building blocks in regenerative materials, offering decisive interactions with living matter, their chemical composition mostly significantly varies when their network morphology is tuned. Since cell behavior is simultaneously affected by the physical, chemical, and structural properties of the gel network, microgels with variable morphology but chemical equivalence are of interest. This work describes a new method to produce thermoresponsive microgels with defined mechanical properties, surface morphologies, and volume phase transition temperatures. A wide variety of microgels is synthesized by crosslinking monomers or star polymers at different temperatures using thermally assisted microfluidics. The diversification of microgels with different network structures and morphologies but of chemical equivalence offers a new platform of microgel building blocks with the ability to undergo phase transition at physiological temperatures. The method holds high potential to create soft and dynamic materials while maintaining the chemical composition for a wide variety of applications in biomedicine.