Sodium Alginate Modifications: A Critical Review of Current Strategies and Emerging Applications

Author: mycolabadmin
11/17/2025
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Summary

Sodium alginate is a natural substance from seaweed that is safe to eat and widely used in foods, medicines, and environmental cleanup. Scientists have developed various ways to modify sodium alginate to make it stronger, more stable, and better at specific jobs like delivering medicines or creating edible packaging. This review explains both the gentle, food-safe ways to modify alginate for food products and stronger chemical methods used for medical and environmental applications. The modifications allow alginate to work better in areas like wound healing, removing pollutants from water, and protecting food freshness.

Background

Sodium alginate (SA) is a natural anionic polysaccharide derived from brown algae that exhibits broad potential applications in food, biomedicine, and environmental engineering. It is officially recognized as safe by major regulatory authorities including the FDA (GRAS status) and EU (food additive E401), validating its use in food, pharmaceutical, and biomedical fields. Despite its advantages in biocompatibility and degradability, SA often exhibits inherent limitations in mechanical strength, environmental stability, bioactivity, and controlled release.

Objective

This review systematically summarizes sodium alginate’s chemical structure, physicochemical characteristics, sources, and extraction methods while comprehensively examining modification strategies across chemical, physical, and biological approaches. The study emphasizes food-compatible and green chemistries that enable development of edible films, coatings, and functional carriers, while distinguishing these from non-food-oriented chemical strategies for biomedical and environmental applications.

Results

The review identifies and categorizes modification strategies into food-compatible approaches (phenolic crosslinking, genipin crosslinking, enzyme-assisted coupling, mild esterification) suitable for edible materials and non-food chemistries (strong sulfation, periodate oxidation, Ugi reactions) for biomedical use. Novel applications of modified sodium alginate are highlighted in food packaging, functional delivery systems, drug release, tissue engineering, and environmental remediation including heavy metal and dye removal.

Conclusion

Chemical tailoring of alginate through food-compatible modification pathways contributes to the design of safe, sustainable, and high-performance bio-based materials for food systems. The synthesis of modification strategies with application domains provides comprehensive guidance for engineering multifunctional SA-based materials while maintaining regulatory compliance and food safety standards.

Published in:Foods,
Study Type:Review,
Source: PMID: 41300089, PMC12652274, DOI: 10.3390/foods14223931