Natural gums and their derivatives based hydrogels: in biomedical, environment, agriculture, and food industry

The hydrogels based on natural gums and chemically derivatized natural gums have great interest in pharmaceutical, food, cosmetics, and environmental remediation, due to their: economic viability, sustainability, nontoxicity, biodegradability, and biocompatibility. Since these natural gems are from plants, microorganisms, and seaweeds, they offer a great opportunity to chemically derivatize and modify into novel, innovative biomaterials as scaffolds for tissue engineering and drug delivery. Derivatization improves swelling properties, thereby developing interest in agriculture and separating technologies. This review highlights the work done over the past three and a half decades and the possibility of developing novel materials and technologies in a cost-effective and sustainable manner. This review has compiled various natural gums, their source, chemical composition, and chemically derivatized gums, various methods to synthesize hydrogel, and their applications in biomedical, food and agriculture, textile, cosmetics, water purification, remediation, and separation fields.

Automated summary

Hydrogels based on natural gums and their chemical derivatives have attracted great interest in various fields including pharmaceutical, food, cosmetics, and environmental remediation due to their economic viability, sustainability, nontoxicity, biodegradability, and biocompatibility. This review summarizes the past work on chemically derivatizing natural gums from plants, microorganisms, and seaweeds into novel biomaterials for tissue engineering and drug delivery. The review also discusses the applications of these hydrogels in various fields such as biomedical, food and agriculture, textile, cosmetics, water purification, remediation, and separation.