“…The most important applications of GA are in the food and pharmaceutical industries where it is used as an excellent emulsifier (Yadav et al, 2007), therefore being recognised as non-toxic for humans (Ali et al, 2009). Recently, GA has been regarded as an alternative biopolymer for the coating and stabilization of nanostructures, including carbon nanotubes (Bandyopadhyaya et al, 2002;Kumar et al, 2008), gold nanoparticles (Kattumuri et al, 2007) and iron oxide nanoparticles (Williams et al, 2006;Banerjee and Chen, 2007a, b;Banerjee and Chen, 2008a, b;Roque and Wilson, 2008;Wilson et al, 2008). In fact, GA showed to be an effective agent to improve colloid stability, enabling for example the production of a magnetic nanocarrier for targeted anticancer drug delivery by grafting cyclodextrin onto GA-modified MNPs (Banerjee and Chen, 2008a).…”