Modified Polysaccharide Hydrogels: Characterization and Applications

Polysaccharides are polymeric carbohydrates containing large number of monomeric sugar units linked together by glycosidic bonds. The presence of different monomeric units, functional moieties made these polysaccharides useful for a wide variety of industrial, cosmetic, food and medical applications due to their occurrence as gels, hydrogels, viscosifying nature, stickiness, binding property, thixotropic behavior, swelling properties, variable bulk density, flow properties, etc. In addition, the most beneficial property of these polysaccharides is to modulate the rheological and chemical-physical properties by varying the cross-linking agents and exploiting their thixotropic behavior. These modifications lead to development of gels/hydrogels bearing different properties.