Ecklonia maxima is a brown seaweed, which is abundantly distributed in South Africa. This study investigated an efficient approach using high-performance centrifugal partition chromatography (HPCPC), which has been successfully developed for the isolation and purification of phlorotannins, eckmaxol, and dieckol from the ethyl acetate fraction of E. maxima (EEM). We evaluated EEM for its inhibitory effect against lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced inflammatory responses in zebrafish embryos. The separation of eckmaxol and dieckol from samples of EEM using HPCPC was found to be of high purity and yield under an optimal solvent system composed of n-hexane:ethyl acetate:methanol:water (2:7:3:7, v/v/v/v). To evaluate the anti-inflammatory efficacy of EEM containing active compounds, zebrafish embryos exposed to LPS were compared with and without EEM treatment for nitric oxide (NO) production, reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation, and cell death two days after fertilization. These evaluations indicate that EEM alleviated inflammation by inhibiting cell death, ROS, and NO generation induced by LPS treatment. According to these results, eckmaxol and dieckol isolated from brown seaweed E. maxima could be considered effective anti-inflammatory agents as pharmaceutical and functional food ingredients.
Keywords: Ecklonia maxima; anti-inflammatory; dieckol; eckmaxol; high-performance centrifugal partition chromatography; zebrafish.