Chapter 5: Self-assembling Hydrogels Based on Natural Building Blocks

Hydrogels have been widely studied in the past two decades because of their high biocompatibility and versatility in many applications such as biomedicine and tissue engineering. In this chapter, we provide an overview of self-assembling hydrogels based on biomolecules including amino acids, peptides, proteins, saccharides, nucleobases and DNA. A focus is placed on the self-assembly process of ‘simple’ molecular entities via powerful and versatile noncovalent interactions, with specific attention for the design of supramolecular hydrogels.