Approaches in biotechnological applications of natural polymers

Natural polymers, such as gums and mucilage, are biocompatible, cheap, easily available and non-toxic materials of native origin. These polymers are increasingly preferred over synthetic materials for industrial applications due to their intrinsic properties, as well as they are considered alternative sources of raw materials since they present characteristics of sustainability, biodegradability and biosafety. As definition, gums and mucilages are polysaccharides or complex carbohydrates consisting of one or more monosaccharides or their derivatives linked in bewildering variety of linkages and structures. Natural gums are considered polysaccharides naturally occurring in varieties of plant seeds and exudates, tree or shrub exudates, seaweed extracts, fungi, bacteria, and animal sources. Water-soluble gums, also known as hydrocolloids, are considered exudates and are pathological products; therefore, they do not form a part of cell wall. On the other hand, mucilages are part of cell and physiological products. It is important to highlight that gums represent the largest amounts of polymer materials derived from plants. Gums have enormously large and broad applications in both food and non-food industries, being commonly used as thickening, binding, emulsifying, suspending, stabilizing agents and matrices for drug release in pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries. In the food industry, their gelling properties and the ability to mold edible films and coatings are extensively studied. The use of gums depends on the intrinsic properties that they provide, often at costs below those of synthetic polymers. For upgrading the value of gums, they are being processed into various forms, including the most recent nanomaterials, for various biotechnological applications. Thus, the main natural polymers including galactomannans, cellulose, chitin, agar, carrageenan, alginate, cashew gum, pectin and starch, in addition to the current researches about them are reviewed in this article.. }To the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientfíico e Tecnológico (CNPq) for fellowships (LCBBC and MGCC) and the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nvíel Superior (CAPES) (PBSA). This study was supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under the scope of the strategic funding of UID/BIO/04469/2013 unit, the Project RECI/BBB-EBI/0179/2012 (FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-027462) and COMPETE 2020 (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006684) (JAT)

Crafted:An exploratory database of simulated adsorption isotherms of metal-organic frameworks

Overview The files in this repository compose the Charge-dependent, Reproducible, Accessible, Forcefield-dependent, and Temperature-dependent Exploratory Database (CRAFTED) of adsorption isotherms. This dataset contains the simulation of CO2 and N2 adsorption isotherms on 690 metal-organic frameworks taken from the CoRE MOF 2014 database. The simulations were performed with two force fields (UFF and DREIDING), six partial charge schemes (no charges, Qeq, EQeq, DDEC, MPNN, and PACMOF), and three temperatures (273, 298, 323 K). Contents CIF_FILES/ contains 6 folders (NEUTRAL, DDEC, EQeq, Qeq, MPNN, and PACMOF), each one with 690 CIF files; FORCEFIELDS/ contains 2 folders (UFF and DREIDING) with the definition of the forcefields; INPUT_FILES/ contains 49,680 input files for the GCMC simulations; ISOTHERM_FILES/ contains 49,680 adsorption isotherms resulting from the GCMC simulation; ENTHALPY_FILES/ contains 49,680 enthalpies of adsorption from the isotherms; RAC_DBSCAN/ contains the RAC and geometrical descriptors to perform the t-NSE + DBSCAN analysis; Licenses The CIF files in the DDEC folder were downloaded from CoRE MOF 2014 and are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC-BY-4.0). Dalar Nazarian, Jeffrey S. Camp, & David S. Sholl. (2016). Computation-Ready Experimental Metal-Organic Framework (CoRE MOF) 2014 DDEC Database [Data set]. Zenodo. The CO2.def and N2.def forcefield files were downloaded from RASPA and are licensed under the terms of the MIT license. RASPA: a molecular-dynamics, monte-carlo and optimization code for nanoporous materials. Copyright (C) 2006-2019 David Dubbeldam, Sofia Calero, Thijs Vlugt, Donald E. Ellis, and Randall Q. Snurr. The CIF files in the PACMOF, MPNN, Qeq, EQeq and NEUTRAL folders were derived from those in the DDEC folder and are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC-BY-4.0). All remaining files are licensed under the terms of the CDLA-Sharing-1.0 license. Software requirements In order to create a Python environment capable of running the Jupyter notebooks, please install conda and execute conda env create --file environment.yml Usage instructions Execute the command below to run JupyterLab in the appropriate Python environment. conda run --name crafted jupyter-labCreated using "tar -Jcvf CRAFTED-1.1.1.tar.xz CRAFTED-1.1.1/"