A systematic review on grafting techniques and their applications with reference to natural gums and mucilage

Gums and mucilage are used in pharmaceuticals, cosmetics as well as in textile industries due to their vast properties such as gelling agent, binder, thickener, disintegrating agent and many more. But even after having immense useful properties, various limitations are also there like loss of viscosity while storage and prone to microbial contamination. To overcome these problems the gums needs to be modified for better stability, rigidity and compatibility by using different techniques such as grafting, curing, blending, cross linking, which can be done by using acrylamides, methyl methacrylate, monochloroacetic acid. Among all, graft copolymerization is the most convenient and it can be performed by employing microwave methods, enzymatic process and using various chemicals for example ceric ammonium nitrate and potassium persulphate. Modified natural gums can be incorporated in the sustained release drug delivery systems and various formulations such as nanoparticles acrylic acid grafted cashew gum, hydrogel of ranitidine HCl with polyacrylamide grafted karaya gum etc are developed by these techniques. The present review discusses about the importance of gums, various grafting techniques along with details of patents for various polymer-based inventions.