Research Article Physicochemical Characterization of Alginate Beads Containing Sugars and Biopolymers Tatiana Aguirre Calvo 1 and Patricio Santagapita 1,2 1 Industry Department and Organic Chemistry Department, Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences, University of Buenos Aires (FCEN-UBA), Buenos Aires, Argentina 2 National Council of Scientifc and Technical Research (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina Correspondence should be addressed to Patricio Santagapita; prs@di.fcen.uba.ar Received 29 June 2016; Accepted 14 August 2016 Academic Editor: Yi-Hung Chen Copyright © 2016 T. Aguirre Calvo and P. Santagapita. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Alginate hydrogels are suitable for the encapsulation of a great variety of biomolecules. Several alternatives to the conventional alginate formulation are being studied for a broad range of biotechnological applications; among them the addition of sugars and biopolymers arises as a good and economic strategy. Sugars (trehalose and -cyclodextrin), a cationic biopolymer (chitosan), an anionic biopolymer (pectin), and neutral gums (Arabic, guar, espina corona, and vinal gums) provided diferent characteristics to the beads. Here we discuss the infuence of beads composition on several physicochemical properties, such as size and shape, analyzed through digital image analysis besides both water content and activity. Te results showed that the addition of a second biopolymer, -CD, or trehalose provoked more compact beads, but the fact that they were compact not necessarily implies a concomitant increase in their circularity. Espina corona beads showed the highest circularity value, being useful for applications which require a controlled and high circularity, assuring quality control. Beads with trehalose showed lower water content than the rest of the system, followed by those containing galactomannans (espina corona, vinal, and guar gums), revealing polymer structure efects. A complete characterization of the beads was performed by FT-IR, assigning the characteristics bands to each individual component. 1. Introduction Considerable research has been conducted in the feld of encapsulation leading to studies on the protection and con- trolled release of bioactive compounds used in pharmaceuti- cal, cosmetic, and food industry [1, 2]. Tere has been great interest in the use of hydrogel beads that contained encap- sulated agents, being the search of adequate excipients that assure stability and controlled release a great challenge. Sev- eral hydrocolloids and biopolymers are used for this purpose due to their properties related to wall protection and delivery as well as their functional and sensory attributes. Among them, sodium alginate (isolated from brown algae) is one of the most used excipients for formulating hydrogel beads due to its encapsulating/gelling properties when cross-linked with divalent ions like calcium [3], leading to a huge range of pos- sibilities, since it possesses several advantages compared with other commonly used biopolymers listed below: (a) easy and low-cost preparation method, which consists of dropping an aqueous solution (or emulsion) of the biopolymer and bioac- tive compound into CaCl 2 [4, 5]; (b) compatibility with other excipients, increasing its wall and release properties; (c) ver- satility, by allowing encapsulation of a wide range of bioactive compound, which are highly sensitive to environmental con- ditions, since the interior is known to be chemically inert [6]; (d) nontoxicity and biodegradability, since results of in vivo studies demonstrated the development of a biodegradable alginate carrier system for antibiotics and bone cells, provid- ing a potential treatment procedure for infected bone defects [7]. However, some disadvantages are ofen associated with this carrier, including high biomolecule leakage, low mechan- ical strength, and large pore size [8]. In order to optimize the encapsulation efciency and control release of biocompounds, the addition of sugars and biopolymers arises as a good and economic strategy. Among sugars, trehalose, a disaccharide used as cryo- and Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Quality and Reliability Engineering Volume 2016, Article ID 9184039, 7 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2016/9184039