Soft X-ray absorption spectroscopy coupled with nano-scale microscopy has been widely used in material science, environmental science, and physical sciences. In this work, the advantages of soft X-ray absorption spectromicroscopy for plant biopolymer research were demonstrated by determining the chemical sensitivity of the technique to identify common plant biopolymers and to map the distributi...

the aim of the present work was to prepare and characterize biopolymer nanocarriers and evaluate their suitability in possible oral delivery of insulin. the egg albumin biopolymer was used to prepare nanoparticles which were further characterized by fourier transformed infrared spectroscopy (ftir), transmission electron microscopy (tem), scanning electron microscopy (sem), zeta potential, dynam...

in order to know the environmental behaviour of toxic pollutants it is fundamental to understandthe role of chemical components of a material on sorption of such pollutants.in this study, the sorption of amix of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (pahs) by cork fractions (i.e. raw cork (cf), free extractive cork(fef) and nonsaponifiable (desf)) has been investigated to better understand the role ...

This work reports a study of the proton-binding capacity of biopolymers obtained from different materials supplied by a municipal biowaste treatment plant located in Northern Italy. One material was the anaerobic fermentation digestate of the urban wastes organic humid fraction. The others were the compost of home and public gardening residues and the compost of the mix of the above residues, d...

The term “biopolymers” usually describes polymers produced in a natural way by living species. Their molecular backbones are composed of repeating units of saccharides, nucleic acids, or amino acids and sometimes various additional chemical side chains contributing also to their functionalities. If the largest part of biopolymers is extracted from biomass, such as polysaccharides from cellulose...

Plant cuticles have been reported as highly efficient sorbents for organic compounds. The objective of this study was to elucidate the sorption and desorption behavior of polar and nonpolar organic compounds with the major structural components of the plant cuticle: the biopolymers cutin and cutan. The sorption affinity values of the studied compounds followed the order: phenanthrene > atrazine...

Thermal properties of native and denatured biopolymers with quite different chemical and steric structure (globular and fibrillar proteins, DNA, starches) were studied by means of differential scanning calorimetry in a wide range of temperatures and concentrations of water. It was shown that both native and denatured humid biopolymers are glassy systems. The glass transition temperature of thes...