Fuel-Driven Enzymatic Reaction Networks to Program Autonomous Thiol/Disulfide Redox Systems

Fuel-driven dissipative formation of disulfide bonds using competing oxidative activation and reductive deactivation presents a possibly very versatile avenue for autonomous materials design. However, this is challenging to realize because of the direct annihilation of oxidizing fuel and a deactivating reducing agent. We overcome this challenge by introducing a redox-based enzymatic reaction network (ERN), enabling the dissipative disulfide formation for molecularly dissolved thiols in a fully autonomous manner. Moreover, the ERN allows for programming hydrogel lifetimes by utilizing thiol-terminated star polymers (sPEG-SH). The ERN can be customized to operate with aliphatic and aromatic thiols and should thus be broadly applicable to functional thiols.