Tetrazine Bioorthogonal Reaction: A Novel Scheme for Polymer and Biomaterials

Bioorthogonal reactions have been widely used on live-cell labeling, animal tissue imaging, drug delivery, and biomaterials in the recent ten years. Tetrazine bioorthogonal chemistry is not only orthogonal with biological system, other click chemistry and traditional polymer chemistry, but also has superb kinetics, generates biocompatibility products, and proceeds under mild reaction condition. All these features enable tetrazine bioorthogonal chemistry to be widely applied to polymer and biomaterial science. Recently there are many exciting accomplishments. This chemistry can act as an ideal method for polymer and nanoparticle modification, a desired vehicle for nanoparticles in vivo delivery, new polymerization strategy, and novel hydrogel formation platform. In this review, we introduce recent advancements in biomaterials based on tetrazine bioorthogonal chemistry. Keywords: Bioorthogonal chemistry, tetrazine, polymer, biomaterials, nanoparticles.