**4. Conclusion and future prospects**

Alginate, as a potential biomaterial, has been successfully explored in different applications such as wound dressing, drug delivery, bone, cartilage. It could afford a moist microenvironment for wound dressing, serve as the carrier for drug delivery, and act as a scaffold for tissue engineering. The outstanding characteristic of alginate for its applications contains biocompatibility, degradable properties, gelatinization capacity, and effective modification to obtain new performances. However, alginate gel suffers from the lack of cell adhesive and mechanical properties, that cause the structural deformation of the scaffold. Despite some strategies that have been carried out to solve these problems, the disadvantages still exist such as lower mechanical properties compared with nature cartilage and lower drug delivery efficiency. For wound dressing, it lacks enough robust and flexible to allow adherence to the skin for a period of time, which maximizing patient uncomfortable and inconvenience. In the future, more novel alginate composites with controlled properties should be constructed by chemical or physical modification. That will play a vital role in intricating drug or cell-loading. Novel alginate composites also could provide mild and targeted degradation properties.
