Chitosan and Its Derivatives: A New Versatile Biopolymer for Various Applications

Abstract

Chitosan is a nontoxic, biodegradable, biocompatible natural aminopolysachharide with diverse applications. Chitosan can be easily modified into different forms such as membranes, sponges, gels, scaffolds, microparticles, nanoparticles, and nanofiber for drug delivery, gene therapy, tissue engineering, and wound healing in biomedical application. Recently, chitosan-based molecularly imprinted polymers have gained considerable attention and showed significant potential in fields, such as environmental remediation, medicine, as well as various industrial applications. However, the performance of the chitosan-based products in various applications is influenced by many factors including the source of chitin, extraction process, molecular weight, degree of deacetylation, pH, ionic strength, concentration, and temperature. This chapter will provide a brief overview of chitosan in molecular imprinting technique as a functional polymer or supporting matrix because of its low cost and high content of amino and hydroxyl functional groups as well as the computational modeling for the designing of chitosan-based material for desired application. Rational designing of chitosan-based derivatives using computational modeling is not only fast and economic but also a greener approach, which helps understanding various thermodynamic and spectroscopic aspects at molecular level. This chapter also discusses diverse applications of chitosan for biomedical, industrial, and environmental applications.