ABSTRACT
Prof. Henri Braconot, director of Botanical Garden in Nancy (France) in 1811, irst isolated a ibrous substance from the cell walls of mushroom, which he called FUNGINE. Later in 1823, Odier discovered that this compound is also one of the major constituents of the exoskeleton of insects and then he renamed as CHITIN (from Greek khitōn meaning tunic or envelope). Prof. C. Rouget in 1859 prepared a compound from chitin by treatment with concentrated caustic solution and observed that, unlike chitin, the resulting substance dissolved in acids. This compound was then named CHITOSAN (pronounced as kite-o-san) by HoppeSeiler in 1894 [1, 2].
