Synthesis, Characterization, and Adsorption Properties of Gum Polysaccharide-Based Graft Copolymers

Over the last half century, many gum polysaccharides have been investigated by the scientic community for their potential applications in food industries such as emulsiers, drug delivery devices, stabilizers, and thickeners, and in pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, textiles, and lithography (Krishnaiah and Srinivas, 2008; Prezotti et al., 2014; Singh and Kim, 2007). Natural gums are polysaccharides consisting of multiple sugar units linked together to create large molecules. Gums are frequently produced by higher plants as a result of their protection mechanisms following injury. ey are heterogeneous in composition. On hydrolysis, simple sugar units, such as arabinose, galactose, glucose, mannose, xylose, and uronic acids, are obtained (Rana et al., 2011). Gum polysaccharide-based gra copolymers, mainly hydrogel polymers, have been used as adsorbents for the removal of dierent impurities, such as dyes and heavy metal ions from the aqueous solutions (Deng et al., 2012; Lan et al., 2014; Masoumi and Ghaemy, 2014; Saravanan et al., 2012; akur et al., 2014). e main advantage of using gum polysaccharides as adsorbents is their environment-friendly nature, abundant availability, and very low cost (Mittal et al., 2013a, 2014a).