Attilio CESÀRO
Dept. Biochemistry, Biophysics and Macromolecular Chemistry, UdR Trieste INSTM
University of Trieste
Via Giorgieri 1 - 34127 Trieste - Italy
Natural polymers are widely used in many applications ranging from medicine to food engineering, their main advantages lying on abundance, biocompatibility and biodegradability. Growing interest in several technology areas has promoted many investigations for the understanding, characterisation and design of biopolymer matrices, based on mixtures of polysaccharides and of polysaccharides with proteins, as well aswith other “bio-based” polymers. Most of the examples of biopolymer matrices and films are in the food field, whereas high-value non-food applications come from the biomedical field, such as drug-delivery, tissue engineering, cell scaffold and enhancement of transplants performance and biocompatibility. The common goal is a product with a suitable texture for specific functions. The fundamental idea in texture tailoring lies on the possibility of modulating the thermodynamics of biopolymer phase separation with the kinetics of biopolymer aggregation and gelation. While the thermodynamics of phase-separated aqueous mixtures of biopolymers has already been studied in some detail, there is little or no information at all for the low-moisture state, like films or blends. As a consequence, also the kinetics governing mixed gelation is almost unexplored.
Within this presentation, some fundamental aspects of biopolymer compatibility and morphological structurization of sample cases will be illustrated with reference to physical and chemo-biological properties and to microscopic structure of materials. Some aspects of morpho-structural characterisation of biopolymer composites based on experiments carried out at the ELETTRA Synchrothron Radiation will be discussed.
