A team from the Kalow and Kulik labs report the use of bifunctional aromatic thioesters as dynamic covalent cross-links in hydrogels, demonstrating that at physiologic pH in aqueous conditions, transthioesterification facilitates stress relaxation on the time scale of hundreds of seconds. This system exemplifies how dynamic cross-links that exchange through an associative mechanism enable tunable stress relaxation without altering stiffness.
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