Unveiling the effect of molecular weight of vanillic acid grafted chitosan hydrogel films on physical, antioxidant, and antimicrobial properties for application in food packaging.

Till now, a wide range of chitosan (CHS)-based food packaging films have been developed. Yet, the role of molecular weight (MW), which is an important physical property of CHS, in determining the physicochemical and biochemical properties of vanillic acid (VA)-grafted CHS hydrogel films synthesized using CHS with different MWs has not been investigated until now. Three kinds of CHS including low, medium, and high MWs were grafted separately with VA through a carbodiimide mediated coupling reaction. No significant difference in water resistance properties was observed with increasing MW of CHS, in contrast to obvious decrease in light transmittance and opacity. The VA-g-CHS hydrogel films exhibited significantly improved light blocking capacity. A significant improvement in antioxidant (~6-fold) and antimicrobial (~1.2-fold) activity was observed after grafting with VA. In contrast, the free radical scavenging and antimicrobial activity decreased with increasing MW of CHS. Most importantly, VA-g-CHS hydrogel films could maintain the freshness of cherry tomatoes for up to 10 days at ~25 °C. However, no significant difference was observed depending on the MW value of CHS. This pioneering work is of great importance in guiding the selection of MW of CHS biomacromolecule to design hydrogel films with desired physicochemical and biochemical properties.

Shape Memory Polymer-Based Nanocomposites Magnetically Enhanced with Fe3O4 Nanoparticles.

This work aimed to investigate the effect of magnetic Fe3O4 nanoparticles (MNP), which are known to have a wide range of applications in recent years, on nanocomposite films prepared with shape memory polymers. Herein, PLA-PEG blend nanocomposite films were prepared by solution casting method using MNP at different ratios. PLA-PEG Blend/MNP nanocomposite films were characterized with Attenuated total reflection infrared spectroscopy (ATR-IR) to determine the -C=O stretching of PLA and Fe-O stretching signals of Fe3O4. The thermal stability, morphology, and magnetic behavior were studied by comparing the results among PLA-PEG blend, PLA-PEG blend/MNP nanocomposite with thermogravimetric analyses (TGA), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and a vibrating sample magnetometer (VSM), respectively. The effect of MNP on the shape memory properties of PLA/PEG blend was investigated. Moreover, the comparison of antimicrobial activity between PLA/PEG blend and PLA-PEG blend/MNP nanocomposite films were conducted by the disk diffusion method. The results showed that MNP increased the thermal stability of the PLA/PEG blend and the nanocomposites inhibited the growth of C.albicans microorganism.

Ultrasensitive and selective homogeneous sandwich immunoassay detection by Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS).

In this report, a simple and highly selective homogeneous sandwich immunoassay was developed for ultrasensitive detection of Staphylococcal Enterotoxin B (SEB) using Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS). The assay uses polyclonal-antibody functionalized magnetic gold nanorod particles as capture probes for SEB, which can be collected via a simple magnet. After separating SEB from the sample matrix, they are sandwiched by using binding-specific antibody-antigen pairs with the help of gold nanorod particles. Gold nanorod particles are bifunctional by design and contain self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) of a SERS tag molecule (5,5-dithiobis (2-nitrobenzoic acid), DTNB) and carboxylic functionalities of DTNB for coupling with a suitable antibody. The correlation between the SEB concentration and SERS signal was found to be linear within the range of 3 fM to 0.3 µM. The limit of detection for the assay was determined to be 768 aM (ca., 9250 SEB molecules per 20 µL sample volume). The gold heterogeneous assay system for SEB detection was also compared with the same SERS probes and gold-coated surfaces as capture substrates. The developed method was further evaluated for detecting SEB in artificially contaminated milk. Finally, the method was used for investigating the SEB specificity on bovine serum albumin (BSA) and avidin.