Advancements and potential of chitosan-genipin complex in biotechnological applications: A comprehensive review

The chitosan-genipin complex has been extensively studied and applied in various fields, attracting increasing attention due to its unique characteristics and properties. This complex enables the development of novel materials for applications in biomedical engineering, biotechnology, and medicine. Chitosan is a natural biopolymer, and genipin is an extract obtained from some fruits, mainly from genipap and gardenia; both have demonstrated biodegradability, biocompatibility, and antimicrobial properties. Due to their versatile and reinforced structure, new materials have shown potential use in drug delivery, tissue engineering, scaffolds, curatives, food packaging, and enzyme immobilization. This review will discuss the chitosan and its modifications, the genipin and its reactivity, and finally, the complex chitosan-genipin, showing some recent developments and applications and some prospectives for other applications in new fields, especially as support for enzyme immobilization.