Bacterial Cellulose for Skin Repair Materials

As is well-known, cellulose is one of the most abundant biodegradable materials in nature and has been the topic of extensive investigations in macromolecular chemistry.It is of great importance to explore renewable natural polymeric materials to solve problems such as population growth, the energy crisis, environment polution, etc. Presently, human beings can produce cellulose by four means.Two of these are by natural synthesis procedures including plant photosynthesis and microbial synthesis.The other two methods are synthetic and enzymatic synthesis from cellobiose fluoride in vitro and the ring-opening polymerization of new carbonyl derivatives such as nitralin.Over the past 30 years, with the development of molecular biology and the application of cell systems in vitro, the mechanism underlying the biosynthesis of cellulose in nature has been extensively explored.Recently, environmental standards have been enhanced for every product and process.Employing new technologies or redesigning products is thus necessary to meet these new environmental standards (El-Saied et al., 2004).Bacterial cellulose (BC, also known as microbial cellulose, MC) is a promising natural polymer synthesized by certain bacteria.Because of its unique structural and mechanical properties as compared to higher plant cellulose, BC is expected to become a commodity material in various fields.The BC fibers have a high aspect ratio with a diameter of 20-100 nm.As a result, BC has a very high surface area per unit mass.This property, combined with its highly hydrophilic nature, results in a very high liquid loading capacity.Morever, biocompatibility makes it an attractive candidate for a wide range of applications in different fields, especially those related to biomedical and biotechnology applications (Dahman, 2009).The fibrous structure of BC consists of a three-dimensional non-woven network of nanofibrils, sharing the same chemical structure as plant cellulose, which is held together by inter-and intra-fibrilar hydrogen bonding resulting in a never-dry hydrogel state with high strength.The biosynthetic pathways of BC, including those involving enzymes and precursors, have been described (Chawla et al., 2009).These cellulosic materials are particularly attractive because of their relatively low cost and plentiful supply.Thus, BC utilization is responsible for one of the largest material flows in the biosphere and is of interest in relation to the analysis of carbon flux at both local and global scales (Lynd et al., 2002).Plenty of work has been devoted to designing ideal biomedical devices from BC.Such devices are advantageous in terms of their high paper-like reflectivity, flexibility, contrast, and biodegradability (Iguchi et al., 2000, Klemm, 2006).Besides, BC has proven to be a www.intechopen.comBiomedical Engineering -Frontiers and Challenges 250 remarkably versatile biomaterial and can be used in a wide variety of products such as paper, electronics, acoustics and so on.Cellulose has always been the prime medium for displaying information in our society and is far better than the various existing display technologies.The BC device has the potential to be extended to countless other applications such as e-book tablets, e-newspapers, dynamic wall papers, rewritable maps, and learning tools (Shah, 2005).Olsson et al. used freeze-dried bacterial cellulose nanofibril aerogels as templates to make lightweight porous magnetic aerogels, which can be compacted into a stiff magnetic nanopaper (Olsson et al., 2010).As intuitionistic introduction, the biomedical applications of BC are shown in Figure 1.However, in most practical applications, BC may not be of perfect quality and its cost may not be suituable for industrialization either.For economical mass production, it is essential to design a culture aeration and agitation process (Yoshinaga, 1997;Yamanaka, 1998).This chapter will discuss the biosynthesis of BC and its application as skin tissue repair material.The skin tissue materials derived from BC may create a luciferous future.In this chapter, we focus on the applications o f B C a s s k i n t i s s u e r e p a i r m a t e r i a l s .Specifically, we summarize the basic properties, different types of BC, and research on BC for the purpose of applying BC to skin tissue engineering.Experimental results and clinical treatments have demonstrated good performance of BC-based wound healing materials.Further, all the results indicate that BC as skin tissue material in the biomedical field will continue to be important in the future.Fig. 1.Biomedical applications of BC-based biomaterials www.intechopen.

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