Laminaria japonica is a traditional material of Chinese herb medicine and possesses many physiological functions. Fucoidan, a class of natural sulfated heteropolysaccharide, isolated from brown algae Laminaria japonica, is known to contain not only L-fucose residues as the main sugar constitute, but also galactose, mannose, xylose, glucuronic acid and so on.
The industrial production of fucoidan from Laminaria japonica is include the following procedures: defatted with ethanol, extraction by acid solution, ultrafiltration, ethanol precipitation, fractionated by ion-exchange chromatography, de-ionization. The industrial technology of producing fucoidan from Laminaria japonica has appled for national invention patent. The technique has a markedly character to produce varied molecular weight fucoidan according to the demand of physiological activities. Compared with the extraction procedures of other researchers, we used mild extraction and refined by ion exchange chromatography and so on.