Abstract
Physical and chemical (crosslinked with genipin) hydrogels based on chitosan and dextran sulfate were developed and characterized as novel bio-materials suitable for probiotic encapsulation. The swelling of the hydrogels was dependent on the composition and weakly influenced by the pH of the media. The morphology analysis supports the swelling data showing distinct changes in microstructure depending on the composition. The viability and culturability tests showed approx. 3.6 log CFU/mL decrease of cells (L. acidophilus as model) incorporated into chemical hydrogels when compared to the number of viable native cells. However, the live/dead viability assay evidenced that a considerable amount of viable cells were still entrapped in the hydrogel network and therefore the viability is most likely underestimated. Overall, the developed systems are robust and their structure, rheology and swelling properties can be tuned by changing the blend ratio, thus constituting appealing bio-matrices for cell encapsulation.
Highlights
Hydrogels are typically defined as tridimensional polymer networks that can take up considerable amounts of solvent without dissolving due to its inherent hydrophilicity (Bhattarai, Gunn, & Zhang, 2010).Hydrogels can be used to form different physical structures such as microparticles or nanoparticles, and coatings (Hoare & Kohane, 2008)
The formation of physical CH-dextran sulfate (DXS) hydrogels was reported earlier (Delair, 2011), we further explored the formation of GP-crosslinked CH-DXS based hydrogels with focus on their preparation and characterization, and on their performance to entrap probiotic cells
Physical and chemical hydrogel formulations were identified with a general non-Newtonian shear thinning and gel-like behaviour regardless of DXS, CH, and GP concentrations
Summary
Hydrogels can be used to form different physical structures such as microparticles or nanoparticles, and coatings (Hoare & Kohane, 2008) They are often highly deformable, mainly due to their unique structural tunability. Their porous structure and, swelling performance can be altered by varying the crosslinking density within the gel matrix (Hoare & Kohane, 2008). These systems can respond to external stimuli, such as pH, light, electric field, and change volume and shape (Shang, Shao, & Chen, 2008). Hydrogels are suitable for a broad range of applications such as drug delivery (Gupta, Vermani, & Garg, 2002; Saboktakin, Tabatabaie, Maharramov, & Ramazanov, 2010), tissue engineering (Drury & Mooney, 2003; Lee & Mooney, 2001), biomedicine (Berger, Reist, Mayer, Felt, & Gurny, 2004; Shang et al, 2008), and encapsulation technologies (Altunbas, Lee, Rajasekaran, Schneider, & Pochan, 2011; Karoubi, Ormiston, Stewart, & Courtman, 2009)
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