The virtuous potential of chitosan oligosaccharide for promising biomedical applications
- PDF / 542,951 Bytes
- 12 Pages / 584.957 x 782.986 pts Page_size
- 42 Downloads / 212 Views
The virtuous potential of chitosan oligosaccharide for promising biomedical applications Ashwini Kumar1 Awanish Kumar1,a) 1
Department of Biotechnology, National Institute of Technology, Raipur, Chhattisgarh 492010, India Address all correspondence to this author. e-mail: [email protected], [email protected]
a)
Received: 9 December 2019; accepted: 13 March 2020
Chitosan is one of the most versatile biopolymers available with established properties such as antimicrobial, antitumor, anti-inflammatory, mucoadhesive, and more. It has been in biomedical research for long, but still the bench-to-bedside translation is hampered because of viscosity and solubility issues. The only commercial application of chitosan has been in hemostatic dressings. Chitosan oligosaccharide (COS), on the other hand, is highly promising in a similar research area where chitosan’s limitations come into the way. COS is highly soluble in water, and its viscosity is very less than that of the parent chitosan. Although COS retains properties very similar to those of chitosan, there has been minuscule volume of research on this water-soluble chitosan. COS has been successfully used as a drug delivery vehicle in various research. COS has also shown to have osteogenic ability. It has been used as a coating on experimental orthopedic implants because of its antibacterial properties. As of now, COS is not a much-explored biopolymer, although it could be an important biopolymer for its capacity in biomedical research. This article reviews various properties and reports of COS relevant for biomedical applications.
Chitosan: biomedical applications and limitations Chitosan exhibits excellent antibacterial, antifungal, antitumor, anti-HIV, and antioxidant activities that have been reported in various reports. The reports are primarily based on its cationic nature. The cationic chitosan can bind, penetrate, and disrupt the anionic bacterial cell wall, which can interact and disrupt even its DNA. A larger degree of deacetylation (or inversely lower degree of acetylation) is more favorable for the antibacterial activity of chitosan [1]. But this activity is more pronounced at lower pH because chitosan has a greater positive charge at lower pH. The antibacterial properties of chitosan have also been used in the form of food packaging films [2]. However, water-soluble low-molecular-weight chitosan has also exhibited significant antibacterial activities against bacteria at neutral pH. Various chitosan composites such as chitosan– ZnO and chitosan–honey nanofibers have shown high efficacy against both Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria [1]. These combinations have been viewed as potent wound-healing fabrications. Chitosan has also displayed significant antifungal activities, mostly against phytopathogens. One of the
ª Materials Research Society 2020
mechanisms is the induction of plant chitinases that destroy the fungi. Human fungal pathogens have also been shown to be highly susceptible to destruction by chitosan [1, 3, 4]. Chitosan has been repo
Data Loading...
