Preparation of low molecular weight fucoidan by gamma-irradiation and its anticancer activity

Fucoidan is a marine sulfated polysaccharide with a wide variety of biological activities. Recently, it has been reported that low molecular weight fucoidan has the enhanced antioxidant and anticoagulative activities. However, degradation techniques such as enzymolysis and acid hydrolysis for obtaining low molecular weight fucoidan, have the disadvantages such as narrow substrate specificity and unfavorable hydrolysis of side groups, respectively. In this study, low molecular weight fucoidan was prepared by gamma-irradiation. When fucoidan was gamma-irradiated, the molecular weight rapidly dropped to 38 kDa when the sample was irradiated at 10 kGy, then gradually dropped to 7 kDa without the significant elimination of the sulfate groups. Low molecular weight fucoidan had higher cytotoxicity than native fucoidan in cancer cells, such as AGS, MCF-7, and HepG-2. In addition, low molecular weight fucoidan showed higher inhibitory activity of cell transformation, which resulted in higher anticarcinogenicity. This result suggests that low molecular weight fucoidan with enhanced biological activities can be produced by a simple irradiation method without changing the functional groups.