L. hyperborea, L. digitata, and A. nodosum were harvested in February 2016 (Quality Sea Veg Ltd., Co. Donegal, Ireland). Samples were cleaned from epitopes, oven-dried following industry practices (50 °C, 9 days), and milled to 1 mm particle size using a hammer mill (Christy and Norris, Chelmsford, UK). All the samples were vacuum-packed and stored at room temperature for further analyses. The dry matter of the dried and milled macroalgae was determined by oven-drying the samples at 105 °C for 16 h. The ash content was determined after ignition of a weighed sample in a muffle furnace at 550 °C for 6 h according to the AOAC.942.05 [38 ]. The N content was determined using the LECO FP 528 instrument (Leco Instruments UKLTD., Cheshire, UK), using the conversion factor 4.17 as described for brown macroalgae by Biancarosa et al. [39 (link)]. The ether extract was determined using Soxtec instrumentation (Tecator, Sweden) following the AOAC.920.39 [38 ], and the total soluble sugars were estimated following the phenol-sulfuric acid assay as described by Brummer and Cui [40 ]. The measurements of fucose and total glucans were performed following the methodology described in Section 3.5 .
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