【正文】
by understanding the crosslinking reaction which has occurred in the blended hydrogels, where the amine groups of chitosan are more reactive to GA than hydroxyls of PVA. The minimum value observed at 50:50 () is probably related to the overall balance between amine and hydroxyl crosslinking which is caused by the formation of a rigid structure amongst the Chi/PVA chains, reducing drastically their possibility of solution uptake. Despite of the present research being different from other reported chitosan studies, similar trends regarding to the swelling behavior of PVA and chitosan supported these ?ndings, where PVA has a swelling degree above 500% and chitosan of about200%, depending of course of the solution medium, pH,temperature and so forth. 4 Conclusion In the present research, chitosan/PVA blends were synthesized and chemically crosslinked with bifunctional aldehyde. The results have shown that by altering the proportion of chitosan to PVA, associated with different crosslinker concentration, the overall properties from hydrogels can be modi?ed. The systems investigated have indicated a signi?cant reduction on the swelling behavior as the chitosan content was increased and also as the amount of crosslinking reagent was raised. This fact was attributed to the formation of a more rigid work. Moreover, cell biopatibility assays have proven that all systems evaluated are nontoxic, biotolerant, and biopatible. In summary, these developed blends based on chitosan/PVA have broadened the number of choices of biomaterials to be potentially used in biomedical applications such as biomaterial, drug delivery vehicles and skin tissue engineering.