Decanoic acid functionalized chitosan: Synthesis, characterization, and evaluation as potential wound dressing material.

Skin wound dressing materials, which can accelerate wound healing and have the synthetic advantages of simplicity, environmental safety, and resource abundance, are becoming a hot topic of research now. Following such a research trend, we prepared novel decanoic acid functionalized chitosan (CSDA) with good solubility by acylation via a facile one-step method. FTIR, 1H NMR, and UV-Vis results demonstrated that alkyl chains were successfully grafted onto C2 positions of chitosan (CS) skeleton through acylation. XRD patterns implied that the crystallinity of CSDA greatly declined due to the introduction of alkyl moieties, favorable for improving water solubility. Conductometric titration results showed that the degrees of substitution of CSDA, CSDA1, and CSDA2 were 41.42, 26.12, and 23.17%, respectively. MTT assay and hemolysis experiments illustrated that all the CSDA samples tested in this work possessed good hemocompatibility (hemolysis rate < 2%) and excellent cytocompatibility (relative cell viability >75%) toward L929 cells. Moreover, CSDA-soaked gauze dressings and full-thickness excisional wound models were employed to estimate the feasibility of CSDA as wound dressing material, and the results displayed that CSDA with the degree of substitution of 41.42% could enhance the wound healing rate to 100% on day 16. Altogether, CSDA might be potential material used as wound dressing.