(594f) Monosodium Urate Monohydrate Crystallization Via Fabricated Uniform Hydrogel Slices

Zeqiu Xia, Xiaobin Jiang*

State Key Laboratory of Fine Chemicals, Research and Development Center of Membrane Science and Technology, School of Chemical Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, P. R. China

*Corresponding author: Email: xbjiang@dlut.edu.cn

Abstract

Crystal morphology control is a critical concern for the crystal engineering and relevant applications. For example, urate crystallization is important for the study of the hyperuricemia induced gout. Herein, biomimetic hydrogel material with uniform surface and vertical structure was fabricated, which possessed hybrid pH-temperature responsibility for high-efficiency interfacial nucleation and concentration regulation functions. The developed hydrogel layers were prepared to slice type as a functional micro-platform and then added into the uric acid dihydrate (UAD) crystal solution to inducing monosodium urate monohydrate (MSUM) crystallization. With different dosage of the hydrogel slices (HGS) in the solution, diverse crystal morphologies can be obtained in an efficient manner, such as "flower", "sphere", "sticky spheres", which entirely distinguished from the one prepared via no-HGS. This work shows the advantage of HGS in controlling crystallization procedure and modifying the specific morphology. Considering the feasible fabrication approach of HGS and the tunable amount via HGS area owing to the uniform thickness, the HGS modified crystallization explores a feasible and convenient approach to prepare the biological crystals with different morphologies and diverse hierarchical structure, which is significant for the crystal engineering research from the theoretical and application aspects.

Figure 1 Monosodium urate monohydrate (MSUM) crystal induced by different amount of HGS. (a) Photomicrograph of the crystal when the pH=5.8 with DL-lactic acid. (b) blank control group without HGS. (c) to (e) Added 10 mg, 20 mg, 30 mg HGS, respectively. (bar of the top images: 50 μm; bar of the bottom images: 25 μm)