**6. Conclusion**

Humans use seaweed since the inception of civilization due to its medicinal properties and other properties, such as manure for the infertile soils. There is also a long history of alginate usage in foods as additives and as emulsifying, gelling, and stabilizing agents. And those characteristics open new areas and industries where alginate can be harnessed and used with success.

In bioremediation, the alginate can act as heavy metal chelating agent and support new technology to rehabilitate the degraded ecosystems.

This function can also serve as medical support to patients poisoned with heavy metals.

Although it was discovered in 1881, one of the main characteristics of alginate was used for a long time without notice: this was as soil conditioner by Europeans and other people since the Bronze Age.

Alginate is one of the easiest and low-cost natural polymers, and because of these particularities, alginate is the most researched polymer among all seaweed polysaccharides. Alginate advantages are now being explored for innovations on other areas, and that is improving the knowledge about alginates.

On the biomedical area, the alginate-based compounds/products will be on the front line of the new emergent methods and techniques evolving the human and animal health in various medical areas. This is happening now with wound dressings and the addition of regeneration factors in the alginate-based ones.

It is believed that with the new demand of natural polymers to substitute synthetic polymers, the alginate from various forms will be harnessed and will gain new types of applications in the industries that work with polymers. That demand is now sorting effects with the increment of investigation and development of new techniques and methods to work with alginate and its subforms, such as alginatenanoclay complexes.

### **Acknowledgements**

This work had the support of Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), through the strategic project UID/MAR/04292/2019 granted to MARE. This work

**13**

**Author details**

Leonel Pereira and João Cotas\*

\*Address all correspondence to: jcotas@gmail.com

provided the original work is properly cited.

*Introductory Chapter: Alginates - A General Overview DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.88381*

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

**Conflict of interest**

also received funding from the European Structural and Investment Funds through the COMPETE Programme and from National Funds through Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) under the program grant SAICTPAC/0019/2015. This work is also co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund

Marine and Environmental Sciences Centre (MARE), Department of Life Sciences, Faculty of Sciences and Technology, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

© 2019 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,

through the Interreg Atlantic Area Programme, under the project NASPA.

*Introductory Chapter: Alginates - A General Overview DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.88381*

also received funding from the European Structural and Investment Funds through the COMPETE Programme and from National Funds through Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) under the program grant SAICTPAC/0019/2015.

This work is also co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Interreg Atlantic Area Programme, under the project NASPA.
