Supporting Data for: Assessing the efficiency of ethyl acetate for lipid extraction as an alternative to the Folch method in selected marine low-trophic species

The study aimed to bridge the knowledge gap in evaluating ethyl acetate (EtOAc) as a single organic solvent in lipid extraction and contribute to a deeper understanding of the targeted organic solvent lipid extraction systems. The efficiency of the EtOAc method was benchmarked against the well-established Folch method on total lipid content, lipid class profile, and fatty acid composition of four marine species: Atlantic salmon (<em>Salmo salar</em> Linnaeus, 1758), the zooplankton <em>Calanus finmarchicus</em> (Gunnerus, 1770), the microalgae <em>Porosira glacialis</em> (Grunow) Jörgensen, 1905, and the macroalgae <em>Saccharina latissima</em> (Linnaeus). Gas Chromatography-Flame Ionization Detector (GC-FID) analyses indicated that these marine species are excellent sources of highly unsaturated fatty acids. Additionally, High-Performance Thin-Layer Chromatography (HPTLC) results demonstrated a synergistic relationship between solvent polarity and lipid polarity. Overall, the EtOAc method proves to be a potent alternative for extracting neutral lipids and free fatty acids from biological materials such as salmon fillets and <em>C. finmarchicus</em>. However, it exhibits lower efficiency with polar and complex lipids, as observed in <em>P. glacialis</em> and <em>S. latissima</em>.