Over the last few years, materials made from renewable and
natural polymers such as polysaccharides, proteins, and lipids have
received increasing attention from researchers and industry. These
materials have several applications as interesting alternatives to
food packaging (Tharanathan, 2003) and these materials have
revealed promising properties envisaging their use in a wide range
of biomedical applications (Malafaya et al., 2007). While the properties
of synthetic polymers are limited, natural polymers provide
many important benefits, including degradability, biocompatibility,
and biological stability (Grenha et al., 2010). Thus, there is