Preparation, Characterazation and Biomedical Application of Pectin Derived

Pectin is a naturally biopolymer that is finding increasing application in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry. It is commercially extract from citrus peels and apple pomace. Compared with polysaccharides from animals, pectin is a more inexpensive and uncomplicated purified polysaccharide source. Pectin has several unique properties that have enabled it to be used as a matrix for entrapment and/or delivery of drugs, proteins and cells in recent years. Pectin is a heterogeneous polymer of α-(1–4)-D-galacturonic acid of varying degrees of esterification, distribution of methoxyl groups, neutral sugar substitution and molecular weight. The charge and structure of pectin influences the functional properties such as gelation ability and water content. Generally, pectin is divided into two major groups, high-methoxyl and low-methoxyl pectin, on the basis of their degree of esterification. Furthermore, diffusion is the major release mechanism for the hydrogel as drug carriers. Thus, excluding the intrinsic properties of the gel beads, how to well control the gel beads size is one of the key parameters. A variety of techniques could be employed to fabricate microbeads. Electro-spraying is one of the methods that could produce the microbeads with diameter less than 300 μm and with narrow distribution. Therefore, the aims of this study are modification the degree of esterification of commercial pectin that extracted from the same source. And the gel microbeads will be generated by electrostatic potential equipments. We will study the effects of fabrication parameters on the physical and chemical properties of gel beads such as rate of gelation, shape and size. Meanwhile, we will establish the release profiles of proteins with various molecular weights. Besides used as drug carriers, because of the major components of pectin is galactose residue, therefore, we will fabricate and study the effect of various degree of esterification pectin as hepatocyte three-dimensional cultured carriers. High water content is one of the general characters of polysaccharides. Thus, we also will develop the fabrication two-dimension pectin gel film technique and study the effect of various degree of esterification for application in wound dressing. We expect together the results of the project could set-up a database for the pectin gel microbeads and gel film for biomedical application.

Project ID:PB9808-2389
External Project ID:NSC98-2221-E182-014