Since the resurgence of interest in chitinous materials in the 1970s, significant efforts have been devoted to their utilization and valorization. With the availability of ISO 13485-certified chitinous materials suitable for biomedical use, these polymers are no longer merely waste-derived byproducts. Chemical derivatization has resulted in a large and diverse body of literature on chitinous-based materials. Nevertheless, the reproducibility of reported results remains a persistent challenge, often arising from inadequate structural and compositional characterization. To address this limitation and to facilitate unambiguous structure-property correlations, this review proposes a first set of minimum NMR reporting standards, illustrated through practical examples. In addition, it provides guidance on the effective use of classical liquid-state NMR techniques, such as 1H, 13C, 1H-1H COSY, 1H-13C HSQC, HMBC and H2BC, as well as emerging diffusion-based methods for the characterization of unknown chitinous materials and their derivatives.
Poucke et al. (Mon,) studied this question.