The biopep database - A tool for the in silico method of classification of food proteins as the source of peptides with antihypertensive activity

A database of potentially biologically active peptide sequences, named BIOPEP (http://www.uwm.edu.pl/biochemia), has been developed and applied for classification of numerous food proteins as potential sources of peptides with antihypertensive activity. More than one hundred proteins included in the BIOPEP database were analyzed and classified according to the frequency of the occurrence of antihypertensive fragments. As the example of detailed profile of potential biological activity, the bovine beta-globulin A is presented. It was found that apart from the dominant anti hypertensive activity, other effects (opioid, dipeptidyl peptidase IV inhibitory, immunomodulative, antioxidative) may be present. It can be concluded that this method may be a useful tool in this field. The antihypertensive activity was the most dominant because fragments with such activity were present in all of the examined proteins. It encouraged us to classify proteins into families, which may be better or the worse source of antihypertensive fragments. We found statistically significant differences between the values of parameter A (P < 0.001) among the all five families we obtained. We found that in silico analysis can be useful in the analysis of the large quantities of data in the field of proteins as the source of biologically active peptides.