Method for the quantification of the blue-green pigment “marennine” synthesized by the marine diatom Haslea ostrearia (Gaillon/Bory) Simonsen using HPLC gel-filtration and photodiode-array detection

This paper describes a new approach for quantifying marennine, a blue-green pigment synthesized by the marine diatom Haslea ostrearia, which is known to be responsible for the greening of cultured oysters in French coastal areas. The method uses gel-filtration HPLC interfaced with a photodiode-array detector (PDA). Under the chromatographic conditions applied, the peak of marennine is identified on the dextran pattern at 674 nm by its elution time (ET = 21–22 min) and its UV-Visible absorption spectrum. After calibration with pure marennine sample as external standard, consisting in plotting peak area as a function of marennine concentration, one can back-calculate concentrations of unknown samples. Results for quantitative determination of marennine using this procedure are validated and discussed in relation to those obtained by the spectrophotometric methods, the most often employed until now.