Visiting Professor presso Sapienza

-Polysaccharide engineering as an approach to design alginate with new functional properties. -Alginate encapsulate cells in the treatment of type I diabetes

Technology and Biotechnology of Algal Polysaccharides: Future Trends

Proceedings oa a workshop organised under the auspices of COST action 49: Use of marine primary biomas

Comparative studies on solution characteristics of mannuronan epimerized by C-5 epimerases

Both dilute and concentrated solutions of bacterial Mannuronan (MANNA) and its epimerized products by AlgE1 at 5 and 24 h, named MANNAEp1t5h and MANNAEp1t24h, respectively, and AlgE4 (MANNAEp4) have been studied as a function of variables such as polymer concentration and ionic strength (NaCl) in order to investigate the macromolecular solution properties of these innovative polyuronic acids having the same charge density but different composition and sequence of b-D-mannuronic acid (-M-), a-L-guluronic acid (-G-) or MGblocks. Measurements of intrinsic viscosity [h] as a function of ionic strength, I, by capillary viscometry has led to an estimate of the Smidsrød- Haug parameter B, an index useful to characterize the stiffness of polymeric chains. The results are largely consistent with much of the published data relative to chain extension and conformational freedom around the torsional angles of the glycosidic linkages occurring in alginates. Steady shear rheometry provided information about the coil-overlapping parameter c*, which marks the transition from dilute to concentrated solution. The slopes of the double logarithmic plots of hsp vs. c[h] both at low and high degrees of coil overlap suggest that all samples solutions behave like linear polymer entangled network systems. The value of c* is strictly influenced by the stiffness of the chains, and hence by the primary structure. Dynamic shear rheometry shows that the frequency dependence of dynamic viscosity is only partially superimposable to the shear rate dependence of viscosity. Such behaviour may be ascribed to the presence of semiflexible polymeric coils in a non-totally destructured entangled state. By solvent/non-solvent (H2O/isopropanol) fractionation carried out on mannuronan, a set of samples with different average molecular weights and narrow polydispersities were obtained. Triple detection GPC allowed the evalutation of the Mark–Houwink–Sakurada parameters as well as of the characteristic ratio CN for one of the fractionated MANNA samples. The chain persistence length was estimated by the wormlike chain model

Trends in algal polysaccharide research: technological and biotechnological aspects

A description of seeweeds of biotechnological interest is reported togheter with information on sources, polysaccharides produced and application developed