A novel category of hydrogel material has been developed (Hawker, Kramer)that form spontaneously in water through complexation of polyelectrolyte endblocks of PEG-based triblock polyelectrolytes—inspired by Waite’s mussel adhesion studies.
SANS (Kramer) and dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP)-enhanced NMR; (Han) reveal that these complexes form dense, yet fluid, coacervate core domains with significant ordering.
