Purification of Alginate for Tissue Engineering

Alginate, as a natural polymer, has been widely used in fields of medical delivery and tissue engineering. However, the commercial alginate contains a large number of impurities to be responsible for side effects on humans. So purification is crucial for alginate application in biomedicine fields. In this work, a study about a method which used chloroform/butanol and activated charcoal to purify commercial alginate was presented. The results showed that the purification procedure described here is simple and effective to reduce proteins and polyphenols to a very low level. The proteins content in the purified sample was low to 3.36% compared with 8.54% in the raw material. And the polyphenols content was only 0.4% of the initial content. Compared with other methods had been published, the method introduced here was more efficient in the reduction of contamination. MTT assay also indicated that the biocompatibility of purified alginate sample was better than the unpurified one.