Thillai Natarajan S, Kalyanasundaram N and Ravi S
In view of the increasing littering of the river banks by shells of crustaceans, a study was carried out to investigate the extraction and characterization of chitin and chitosan from apple snail. Chitin and chitosan was extracted and characterized from apple snail the conventional methods of pretreatment, demineralization, deprotienization and deacetylation. The results obtained revealed that carbon nitrogen ratio of the chitosan extracted was 5.7 with a degree of deacetylation of 59.69% and 58.66% calculated from the elemental analysis and the FTIR spectra of chitosan respectively. The FTIR spectra for chitosan gave a characteristic-NH2 band of 2921.48 cm-1 and a carbonyl group band of 2523.11 cm-1. The mussel shell was discovered to contain a mineral content of 48.43% and a chitin composition was found to be 18.44%.