A functional lignin for heavy metal ions adsorption and wound care dressing.

Recently, the application of lignin activation by demethylation to improve reactivity and enrich multiple functions has intensively attracted attention. However, it is still challenge up to now due to the low reactivity and complexity of lignin structure. Here, an effective demethylation way was explored by microwave-assisted method for substantially enhancing the hydroxyl (-OH) content and retaining the structure of lignin. Then, the optimum demethylated lignin was used to removal heavy metal ions and promote wound healing, respectively. In detail, for microwave-assisted demethylated poplar lignin (M-DPOL), the contents of phenolic (Ar-OH) and total hydroxyl (Tot-OH) groups reached the maximum for 60 min at 90 °C in DMF with 7.38 and 9.13 mmol/g, respectively. After demethylation, with this M-DPOL as lignin-based adsorbent, the maximum adsorption capacity (Qmax) for Pb2+ ions reached 104.16 mg/g. Based on the isotherm, kinetic and thermodynamic models analyses, the chemisorption occurred in monolayer on the surface of M-DPOL, and all adsorption processes were endothermic and spontaneous. Meanwhile, M-DPOL as a wound dressing had excellent antioxidant property, outstanding bactericidal activity and remarkable biocompatibility, suggesting that it did not interfere with cell proliferation. Besides, the wounded rats treated with M-DPOL significantly promoted its formation of re-epithelialization and wound healing of full-thickness skin defects. Overall, microwave-assisted method of demethylated lignin can offer great advantages for heavy metal ions removal and wound care dressing, which facilitates high value application of lignin.

Fabrication of uniform lignin nanoparticles with tunable size for potential wound healing application.

The construction of lignin nanoparticles (LNPs) with both lignin properties and nanomaterial properties through controlling the morphologies and structures of lignin is one of the effective ways to realize its application in the field of biomedicine. Firstly, the morphology and chemical structure of LNPs were studied in detailed. The results showed that the chemical structural characteristics of LNPs had not changed significantly and its morphology was more regular shape and narrower size distribution (50-350 nm). Besides, LNPs also exhibited excellent water dispersion stability and high negative zeta potential. Subsequently, LNPs as wound dressings had good antioxidant property, excellent adsorption capacity of protein, outstanding bactericidal activity and remarkable biocompatibility, suggesting that LNPs did not interfere with cell proliferation during wound healing. Finally, the in vivo results of mouse wounds further illustrated that treatment of wounded skin wounds with LNPs enhanced its effective healing. After 15 days, as compared with the untreated control and original lignin (OL) groups, the wounds treated of LNPs was completely closed and granulation tissue formation was advanced. Overall, this study can be a good method for high-value applications of LNPs, and highlighting the advantages of using lignin as medical adjuvant nanomaterials to accelerate wound healing.

Using DVS-NIR to assess the water sorption behaviour and stability of a griseofulvin/PVP K30 solid dispersion.

The purpose of this work was to investigate the distribution of water in a physically unstable amorphous solid dispersion (polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) and griseofulvin (as a model hydrophobic drug)), both as the sample absorbs water and during prolonged exposure to elevated humidity by use of dynamic vapour sorption combined with near infrared (DVS-NIR). The solid dispersion absorbed much less water than the sum of the water sorption of the individual components. This suggests that griseofulvin hindered PVP from absorbing water through the formation of the solid dispersion. Prolonged storage of the solid dispersion at 75% RH resulted in no significant mass change. Whilst this would usually be interpreted as the absence of crystallization, the NIR spectra demonstrated that crystallization occurred. The reason for the lack of a weight loss was that the expelled water from amorphous griseofulvin was sorbed by PVP, meaning that as the dispersion was broken by the crystallisation of griseofulvin, the PVP was once again free to sorb water (in line with the higher water sorption shown by PVP alone, and in contrast with the lower sorption of water by the solid dispersion). As water is a key factor in the physical stability of amorphous systems, understanding how and where water is absorbed and how this is liable to change is an important advance and offers promise in understanding the mechanism of stabilisation of solid dispersions, and therefore may be useful to predict the stability of new API dispersions.