Abstracto

Development of natural polymer beads for a variety of technological applications

Diego T.Santos, Juliana Q.Albarelli

Alginate is a natural polymer extracted from various species of brown seaweed. Ca-alginate beads are used extensively in various industries such as in food processing to produce restructured foods, in biotechnology for immobilization of cells or enzymes and in environmental applications for removal of heavy metals. The simplicity of this polymer regarding to the ability to formgel beads inmild conditions and its biocompatibility and notoxicity have stimulated Ca-alginate beads application in different areas. An evaluation of potential newindustrial applications of Ca-alginate beads with different species entrapped is provided, based on the authors 5 years of experience in development of polymeric beads. In all evaluated applications Ca-alginatematrix could retain its properties after entrapping the species showing a different bead surface morphology to each case. On the other hand, the properties of the entrapped species showed less activity than when not entrapped. Due to the various benefits associated to the immobilized/encapsulated systems, such as reuse of species several times, protection to unstable compounds, etc. the development of polymeric bead with entrapped species may compensates these losses.