Wound dressing membrane heals skins faster, protects from bacteria, virus, etc., and also decreases the time to epithelialize by covering the wound, which can interfere with infection. Wound dressing membrane make the wound... [ view full abstract ]
Wound dressing membrane heals skins faster, protects from bacteria, virus, etc., and also decreases the time to epithelialize by covering the wound, which can interfere with infection. Wound dressing membrane make the wound dehydrated and allows gas permeation between wound and atmosphere.
Chitin is the second abundant polysaccharide after cellulose, has similar structure to cellulose, i.e. poly-(1→4)-β-N-acetyl-D-glucosamine. It is generally extracted from arthropods, crustaceans and insects. Chitin can be classified into α-, β- and γ-form, respectively. Typically, the solubility of α-chitin extracted from shrimp or crab shell is very poor because of its high crystallinity from intermolecular hydrogen bonding between molecular chains. It exists as highly crystalline form in nature. Due to its low solubility, toxic solvent like 1,1,1,3,3,3-hexafluoro-2-isopropanol (HFIP) was usually used. However, β-chitin is feasible to be fabricated using a mild solvent like formic acid, and thus can be used in various forms for medical applications, such as wound dressing, suture, artificial skin, and drug delivery system.
Electrospinning is widely used as an excellent method for generating a non-woven nanofibrous membrane. The electrospinning process is simple, but some cases need to figure out the nature on polymer solution and processing unique factors.
Until now, several researches reported that chitin nanofibers were fabricated using α-chitin and highly toxic HFIP. In this study, β-chitin was extracted from cuttlefish bone, which consists of bundle of nanofibers, and hierarchical structures are wrapped with proteins and cluster, using simple chemical process. Briefly, β-chitin was the acid treatment for demineralization, followed by alkali-treated to remove the proteins. Afterwards, β-chitin was dissolved in formic acid as a solvent to evaluate the electrospinnability. Structure and physical properties of extracted β-chitin were investigated by ATR-IR, 1H-NMR, SEM/EDS, XRD, texturemeter, and viscometer.
