  Blazars are a subclass of active galactic nuclei (AGN) that have a
relativistic jet with a small viewing angle towards the observer. Recent
results based on hadronic scenarios have motivated an ongoing discussion of how
a blazar can produce high energy neutrinos during a flaring state and which
scenario can successfully describe the observed gamma-ray behaviour. Markarian
421 is one of the closest and brightest objects in the extragalactic gamma-ray
sky and showed flaring activity over a 14-day period in March 2010. In this
work, we describe the performed analysis of \textit{Fermi}-LAT data from the
source focused on the MeV range (100 MeV - 1 GeV), and study the possibility of
a contribution coming from the $p\gamma$ interactions between protons and MeV
SSC target photons to fit the very high energy (VHE) gamma-ray emission. The
fit results were compared with two leptonic models (one-zone and two-zone)
using the Akaike Information Criteria (AIC) test, which evaluates
goodness-of-fit alongside the simplicity of the model. In all cases the
photohadronic model was favoured as a better fit description in comparison to
the one-zone leptonic model, and with respect to the two-zone model in the
majority of cases. Our results show the potential of a photohadronic
contribution to a lepto-hadronic origin of gamma-ray flux of blazars. Future
gamma-ray observations above tens of TeV and below 100 MeV in energy will be
crucial to test and discriminate between models.
