Development of an analytical strategy for the identification of potential bioactive peptides generated by in vitro tryptic digestion of fish muscle proteins

In the last years, food proteins and peptides are attracting great attention because of the emergence of a new field, that of food-derived bioactive peptides. This paper presents a comparison and evaluation of four different experiments for the identification of sarcoplasmic and myofibrillar fish peptides. This study is aimed at the development of a simple and fast method for the identification of peptides that could arise from fish meat if trypsin was the only digestive enzyme acting on fish meat proteins. In particular, we tested the use of ultrafiltration membranes with a molecular weight cutoff of 3,000 Da. Data analysis has shown that the experiment in which there is neither precipitation nor an ultrafiltration step performed better and allowed the identification of a larger number of peptides and potential antimicrobial peptides (AMPs); this workflow provided 473 and 398 total identified peptides and 44 and 18 AMPs for sarcoplasmic and myofibrillar extracts, respectively. This protocol is found to be faster and more straightforward than the other three tested workflows. The developed strategy could be also useful for other food matrices and could provide information about food quality and safety control.