Preparation of Essential Oils Loaded Sodium Alginate/Gelatin Blended Films: Their Antibacterial and Antioxidant Activities

Antibacterial resistance has become a major health care problem around the world. So, need for new novel drugs that can act as antibacterial agents became essential to overcome the bacterial resistance in the last decade. Essential oils (EOs) are known as aromatic oily materials that found as liquid with a strong odor, and produced from different parts of plants. EOs provide a strong antibacterial activity that leads to their role in the protection of plants against different species of bacteria. Within this study, complexes of sodium alginate and gelatin polymers were prepared. Two different EOs which were extracted from two plants from Citrus species which are orange (Citrus sinensis), and lemon (Citrus limon) were loaded on the polymer complexes. The final products were diluted in order to prepare different concentrations and examined for antibacterial activity and antioxidant activity. For antibacterial activity, Broth Microdilution assay was conducted in order to determine MICs for the products. While for the antioxidant activity, four different assays were conducted including; Total phenol and flavonoid contents, FRAP, and Ferrous ion-chelating effect. The results obtained from this study indicate that the final products exhibit antioxidant activity that is correlated with the concentration of essential oils within the polymer complexes. While for that antibacterial activity, the resulted showed that the lemon EO polymer complex exhibited higher activity than orange EO polymer complex.