Acta Scientiarum Polonorum Technologia Alimentaria

Proteins are the multifunctional food components affecting the living organisms. One of the proteins function is the impact on the body due to the presence of motifs that show specific physiological and biological activities. Due to the worldwide growth of demand for the food containing bioactive components, increasing attention has been paid recently to the use of bioactive peptides as physiologically active food ingredients. They are important elements of the prevention and treatment of various lifestyle diseases. In addition to its primary function and according to current knowledge, each protein may be a reserve source of peptides controlling the life processes of organisms. For this reason, in this work, application of a new, additional criterion for evaluating proteins as a potential source of biologically active peptides, contributes to a more comprehensive and objective definition of their biological value. A complementary part of such research is the strategy for evaluation of the food proteins as precursors of biologically active peptides which involves the database of proteins and bioactive peptides – BIOPEP (available online at: http://www.uwm.edu.pl/biochemia). The database contains information on 2123 peptides representing 48 types of bioactivities, their EC₅₀ values and source of origin. Proteins (706 sequences) are considered as bioactive peptide precursors based on newly introduced criteria: the profile of potential biological activity, the frequency of bioactive fragments occurrence and potential biological protein activity. This original and unprecedented so far approach, started to be successfully and more widely applied by other authors. BIOPEP can be interfaced with global databases such as e.g. TrEMBL, SWISS-PROT, EROP and PepBank. Recently the BIOPEP database was enlarged with the data about allergenic proteins, including information about structure of their epitopes and molecular markers.