Bioinspired hydrogel-based nanofluidic ionic diodes: nano-confined network tuning and ion transport regulation.

Congcong Zhu, Yunfei Teng, Ganhua Xie, Pei Li, Yongchao Qian, Bo Niu, Pei Liu, Weipeng Chen, Xiang-Yu Kong, Lei Jiang, Liping Wen

Chemical communications (Cambridge, England) 2020 Jul 21

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Biological ion channel-based mass transport and signal transduction play a crucial role in physiological activities, and biomimetic nanochannels in aqueous solutions for ion transport regulation have been extensively studied. Few studies on non-aqueous systems, gel-based nanochannels, mainly focus on the charged gel network or embedded electrolytes. However, the basic issue of how a nanoscale gel network affects the ion transport in nanochannels has been neglected. Here, we demonstrate a non-aqueous biomimetic nanochannel system by employing the agarose hydrogel in conical nanochannels. To tune the hydrogel network by adjusting the gel concentration, the ion transport behavior in gel-based nanochannels is systemically investigated. The experimental results show that the ion transport behaviors in gel-nanochannels with 2% gel present similar ion selectivity and rectification performance to the aqueous system, indicating fast investigation of gel-based systems with the knowledge of the extensively studied aqueous systems. Furthermore, a gel-based solid-state diode and logic circuits were fabricated.

Citation

Congcong Zhu, Yunfei Teng, Ganhua Xie, Pei Li, Yongchao Qian, Bo Niu, Pei Liu, Weipeng Chen, Xiang-Yu Kong, Lei Jiang, Liping Wen. Bioinspired hydrogel-based nanofluidic ionic diodes: nano-confined network tuning and ion transport regulation. Chemical communications (Cambridge, England). 2020 Jul 21;56(58):8123-8126