Bioactive peptide encapsulation by electrospinning technique: Characterization of electrospun fibers and mathematical modelling of release kinetics

Abstract

Bioactive peptides, which are biologically active amino acid groups in the sequence of proteins, exhibit a variety of beneficial effects including antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, antihypertensive, anticancer, antidiabetic, antimicrobial, antithrombotic, hypocholesterolemic, antiaging and opioid activities as well as prevention of cancer, osteoporosis, hypertension, cardiovascular disorders and neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson and Alzheimer's diseases. However, the bioactive peptides isolated from plants and animals may be lost during processing and storage. Furthermore, bioactive peptides have short in vivo half-lives, low bioavailability and poor stability against gastrointestinal conditions. Therefore, to use of encapsulation technologies such as coacervation, ionic gelation, electrospraying, microfluidic, emulsification, liposomal encapsulation, spray drying and electrospinning have been started to become widespread. Considering the above, the objectives of this Ph.D. thesis were (i) to produce a nanofibrous delivery vehicles for bioactive peptides without using any synthetic polymers or any hazardous solvents by using electrospinning, to characterize electrospun fibers to evaluate the effect of formulation and properties of feed solutions on electrospinnability and to examine the encapsulation efficiencies of produced nanofibrous delivery vehicles by using a model peptide; (ii) to produce carnosine (Car) loaded water-in-oil-in-water (W1/O/W2) double emulsions with different formulations using as feed emulsions in emulsion electrospinning study; (iii) to produce carnosine (Car), an antioxidative peptide, loaded pullulan (Pul)-sodium alginate (NaAlg) based composite nanofibers by uniaxial (blending), coaxial and emulsion electrospinning techniques and to characterize electrospun fibers to evaluate the effect of solution /emulsion properties and the role of emulsion parameters; (iv) examining the encapsulation efficiencies of electrospun fibers and to investigate the effect of encapsulation on antioxidant activity of Car; to determine the effects of electrospinning encapsulation and crosslinking on release behavior of carnosine from electrospun nanofibers during in vitro digestion and to analyse the release kinetics by establishing corresponding mathematic models.