Food Chemistry Commons^™

Chitosan-Gallic Acid Films As Multifunctional Food Packaging, Stephanie Beth Schreiber

Masters Theses

Chitosan is a good candidate for multifunctional food packaging because of its biocompatibility, biodegradability, antibacterial properties, secondary antioxidant activity, film forming ability, resistance to lipids and because of its structure which is very desirable for grafting various compounds to it. For this research, we took advantage of chitosan’s amino group that has nuceleophilic character at a pH above its pKa, which is 6.3. Gallic acid, a phenolic compound with primary antioxidant properties was grafted to chitosan using 1-ethyl-3-(3-dimethylaminopropyl) carbodiimide and N-hydroxysuccinimide. Grafting was evaluated using FTIR-ATR and ¹H and ¹³CNMR. FTIR showed evidence of grafting on the amino …