Abstract
The fucose-containing sulfated polysaccharides (SP) from brown algae exhibit a wide range of bioactivities and are, therefore, considered promising candidates for health-supporting and medicinal applications. A critical issue is their availability in high, reproducible quality. The aim of the present study was to fractionate and characterize the SP extracted from Saccharina latissima (S.l.-SP) harvested from two marine habitats, the Baltic Sea and North Atlantic Ocean, in May, June and September. The fractionation of crude S.l.-SP by anion exchange chromatography including analytical investigations revealed that S.l.-SP is composed of a homogeneous fraction of sulfated galactofucan (SGF) and a mixture of low-sulfated, uronic acid and protein containing heteropolysaccharides. Furthermore, the results indicated that S.l. growing at an intertidal zone with high salinity harvested at the end of the growing period delivered the highest yield of S.l.-SP with SGF as the main fraction (67%). Its SGF had the highest degree of sulfation (0.81), fucose content (86.1%) and fucose/galactose ratio (7.8) and was most active (e.g., elastase inhibition: IC50 0.21 μg/mL). Thus, S.l. from the North Atlantic harvested in autumn proved to be more appropriate for the isolation of S.l.-SP than S.l. from the Baltic Sea and S.l. harvested in spring, respectively. In conclusion, this study demonstrated that habitat and harvest time of brown algae should be considered as factors influencing the yield as well as the composition and thus also the bioactivity of their SP.
Highlights
Sulfated polysaccharides (SP) represent a complex group of biopolymers with a wide range of important biological functions and activities [1,2,3,4,5]
The standardized procedure that was used led to S.l. extracts mainly consisting of sulfated polysaccharides
According to anion exchange chromatography (AEC) and further analysis, the crude S.l.-SP were composed of a small fraction of laminarin, some proteins and phlorotannins (F1), a homogeneous high-sulfated fraction (F3), which was identified as sulfated galactofucan (SGF) with a degrees of sulfation (DS) of about 0.8 and a mixture of lower sulfated, but uronic acid and protein containing SP (F2)
Summary
Sulfated polysaccharides (SP) represent a complex group of biopolymers with a wide range of important biological functions and activities [1,2,3,4,5]. It is generally challenging to produce marine SP in a reproducible quality, since they are usually complex, heterogeneous molecule mixtures, but they vary substantially in their composition depending on the source material (e.g., alga species, harvest time), environmental parameters (e.g., light, nutrition, salinity, temperature), as well as the process of extraction and purification [10,11,13,14]. The fucoidans found in the cell walls and intercellular spaces of brown algae represent a tremendous number of structurally distinct fucose-containing SP ranging from homofucans to complex, highly branched heteropolysaccharides [3,10,15,16] so that some authors consider the term fucose-containing sulfated polysaccharides more appropriate than the term fucoidan [10,17]. Even crude fucoidan isolated from a single species of brown algae mostly consists of a mixture of structurally distinct polymers and the composition of this mixture may considerably vary depending on a multitude of factors (see above)
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