Structural characteristics of oxidized scleroglucan and its network

Abstract

The controlled oxidation of scleroglucan was performed with sodium periodate to prepare scleraldehyde, which was utilized for further crosslinking reaction with hexamethylenediamine. The structural characterization of scleraldehyde and its hydrogel was attempted by small-angle X-ray scattering in order to obtain deeper information and more general criteria for the preparation of drug delivery systems. Although scleraldehyde with lower degree of oxidation than 20% retains a triple-stranded helical conformation, a triple-stranded chain was found to disentangle in single chains with increasing the degree of oxidation. The hydrogel prepared from scleraldehyde consisted mostly of the crosslinked domains formed by multiple single chains aligned in parallel. The crosslinked domains were linked by disentangled single chains and distributed in random to form a network.