A Review of the Antimicrobial Activity of Chitosan

By R. Goy, D. Britto, O. Assis. 2009

1,267 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Chitosan, a versatile hydrophilic polysaccharide derived from chitin, has a broad antimicrobial spectrum to which gram-negative, gram-positive bacteria and fungi are highly susceptible. In the current review, three possible and accepted antimicrobial mechanisms for chitosan are presented and briefly discussed. The activity dependence on polymeric molecular weight (MW) and degree of acetylation (DA) are described. The chitosan minimum inhibitory concentrations (MIC) are summarized according to recent data found in the literature. The potential to improve inhibitory growth of bacteria by using water soluble chitosan derivatives is also discussed. The data indicate that the effectiveness of chitosan varies and is dependent on species of target microorganisms.

Subfields: Biomaterials, Food Science, Organic Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/06870368925f5a5630999ce21687aae86e0fd1cb

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In Biomaterials

1. E. Rabea
2. M. Badawy
3. C. P. Jiménez‐Gómez
4. J. A. Cecilia

In Food Science

1. M. Badawy
2. E. Rabea

In Organic Chemistry

1. C. P. Jiménez‐Gómez
2. J. A. Cecilia

Citations in the corpus

• A Biopolymer Chitosan and Its Derivatives as Promising Antimicrobial Agents against Plant Pathogens and Their Applications in Crop Protection (2011, background): “Chitosan, as the most abundant naturally occurring amino-polysaccharide, possesses many of these attributes and has attracted attention because of its unique physiochemical characteristics and biological activities [6, 8, 9].”
• Chitosan: A Natural Biopolymer with a Wide and Varied Range of Applications (2020, background): “Chitosan and its derivatives exhibit differential activity towards Gram positive and Gram negative bacteria, as is evident in most studies (Figure 11) [26,121].”
• Chitosan-Based Coating with Antimicrobial Agents: Preparation, Property, Mechanism, and Application Effectiveness on Fruits and Vegetables (2016, background): “Figure 1: The deacetylation pathway of chitosan from chitin and the acid-base equilibrium attributes of chitosan [44, 47, 48].”
• Chitosan as a Wound Dressing Starting Material: Antimicrobial Properties and Mode of Action (2019, background): “Although chitosan’s antibacterial activity is lower compared with conventional antibiotics, its unique chemical behavior, namely the presence of three reactive functional groups (an amino group at the C-2 position, a primary OH group at the C-6 position, and secondary OH groups at the C-3 position),”