Polyelectrolyte hydrogels perform interesting physical and chemical changes, such as motility and bend in the presence of electric fields and interaction with ionic surfactants. We think that ionizable groups of polyelectrolyte hydrogels play a vital role in these environments. In this work we prepared three anionic polyelectrolyte hydrogels by two different routes, and micropipetts electrode was employed to determined negative potential in the gels. Our work showed that the gels reported herein all display a high degree of swelling with hydration and have a substantial negative potential in KCl solution and a simple mechanism was also described. (C) 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.