Fabricating concurrently stretchable and conductive hydrogel scaffold is highly desired in the development of myocardial tissue engineering, and also very challenging especially with the anisotropic conductive properties. Existing anisotropic-strategies are limited to specific nanomaterials, or time-consuming. Here, we present a simple and new stretch-induced strategy to make conductive nanotubes aligned in the hydrogel. With this strategy, we fabricated a new type of hybrid hydrogel that possesses excellent stretchability while enabling outstanding anisotropic conductivity (6 vs 30 S/cm). Hybrid hydrogels are also successfully applied as a therapeutic cardiac patch which induces an elongated cell morphology of cultured cardiomyocytes and enables a stable directional transmission of electric signals. This patch gave successful mitigation of myocardium infarction in rats. It is believed that this strategy, and this nanocomposite hydrogel have a promising application in tissue engineering.

中文翻译：

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可拉伸和各向异性导电复合水凝胶作为治疗性心脏贴片

在心肌组织工程的发展中非常需要同时制造可拉伸和导电的水凝胶支架，并且也非常具有挑战性，尤其是具有各向异性的导电特性。现有的各向异性策略仅限于特定的纳米材料，或者很耗时。在这里，我们提出了一种简单且新的拉伸诱导策略，使导电纳米管在水凝胶中对齐。通过这种策略，我们制造了一种新型混合水凝胶，它具有出色的拉伸性，同时具有出色的各向异性电导率（6 对 30 S/cm）。混合水凝胶也成功地用作治疗性心脏贴片，诱导培养的心肌细胞的细长细胞形态，并实现电信号的稳定定向传输。该贴片成功缓解了大鼠的心肌梗塞。相信这种策略和这种纳米复合水凝胶在组织工程中具有广阔的应用前景。