Rheology-based pore size estimation in polyacrylamide hydrogels for DNA analysis
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The physiochemical properties of Polyacrylamide hydrogels have made them important in a variety of biomedical applications including drug delivery, tissue engineering, and electrophoresis of charged biomolecules. In this paper, we perform a series of in-situ dynamic smallamplitude oscillatory shear measurements during photopolymerization of crosslinked Polyacrylamide electrophoresis gels to investigate the relationship between rheology and parameters associated with the gelation process including UV intensity, monomer and crosslinker composition, and reaction temperature. These results are then combined with a simple model based on classical rubber elasticity theory to obtain estimates of the average gel pore size.