Biochemistry & Nutrition

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Biomedical applications of collagen and chitosan
(Society of Fisheries Technologists (India), 2010) Mathew, S.; Asha, K.K.; Anandan, R.; Sankar, T.V.
Biopolymer is a term used to refer to the polymers which are biologically synthesized by nature. Polysaccharides are one such class of polymers comprising of simple monosaccharide molecules connected by ether type linkage to give a high molecular weight polymer. Among the different polysaccharides, cellulose and chitin are the most abundant biopolymers. Professor Henri Braconnot, Director of the Botanical Garden in Nancy, France isolated a fraction called fungine in 1 811 from the cell walls of mushrooms (Madhavan, 1992). Odier (1823) found similar material in the cuticle of beetles and re-named fungine as chitin after the Greek word chiton. The discovery of chitosan is ascribed to Rouget in 1859 (Sambasivan, 1992) and he, by boiling chitin in KOH, produced chitosan soluble in organic acids. Now it is understood that chitin is soluble in dimethyl acetamide containing 5% lithium chloride (Rutherford and Austin, 1978) and insoluble in aqueous acetic acid and chitosan's solubility is reverse to that of chitin in these two solvents. The nitrogen content of chitin is usually less than 7%, while that of chitosan is more than 7%. It was only in 1950, the structure of chitosan was resolved. Collagen is produced from air bladder of fish and chitosan from prawn shell.