Plant-Inspired Multifunctional Fluorescent Hydrogel: A Highly Stretchable and Recoverable Self-Healing Platform with Water-Controlled Adhesiveness for Highly Effective Antibacterial Application and Data Encryption–Decryption

In recent years, hydrogels as an attractive class of intelligent soft materials have been applied in various advanced fields, including electronic materials, wearable devices, and wound dressing materials. However, it still remains a critical challenge to integrate information encryption transmission capability, antibacterial activity, high mechanical performance, adhesiveness, and self-healable ability into one material and achieve the synergistic characteristics through a simple method. In our study, a facile strategy of a plant-inspired hydrogel was proposed, which provides a novel initiator-free photo-cross-linked hydrogel system by simply mixing the coumarin derivative Pho-CA and the monomer in water, and then obtaining the hydrogel Gel-C-Am under the irradiation of UV light without adding any other cross-linking agents and initiators, and this process is very similar to the growth process of plants in nature. This novel hydrogel presents desirable mechanical properties (including twist, stretchability, and recoverability), which exhibits elongation of approximately 1600%. More interestingly, Gel-C-Am hydrogel displays reversible adhesiveness to various substrates (such as glass, paper, leaves, and rubber), and its adhesion properties can be regulated by water: the viscosity disappears when its surface becomes wet, and the viscosity will recover after the water evaporates. In addition, the developed hydrogel has certain self-healable ability. Two pieces of the Gel-C-Am hydrogel can combine together and reshape into one piece in water, and the fused hydrogel has uniform and interconnected pores under SEM. Based on the characteristic of Pho-CA whose fluorescence get recovery after UV irradiation, the hydrogel can be used in the field of encryption and decryption. Also, the resulting Gel-C-Am hydrogel shows an effective antibacterial activity and can potentially be addressed as antibacterial coatings. Taken together, the formation of the novel fluorescent hydrogel system is just like the growth of a plant in the presence of water and light, Pho-CA and the monomer will form a highly stretchable and recoverable self-healing hydrogel with water-controlled adhesiveness. The developed Gel-C-Am hydrogel shows favorable attributes and is suitable for applications in antibacterial polymeric coatings and information encryption transmission.