FermFooDb: A database of bioactive peptides derived from fermented foods

Abstract

Globally fermented foods are in demands due to their functional and nutritional benefits. These foods are sources of probiotic organisms and bioactive peptides, various amino acids, enzymes etc. that provides numerous health benefits. FermFooDb (https://webs.iiitd.edu.in/raghava/fermfoodb/) is a manually curated database of bioactive peptides derived from wide range of foods that maintain comprehensive information about peptides and process of fermentation. This database comprises of 2205 entries with following major fields, peptide sequence, Mass and IC50, food source, functional activity, fermentation conditions, starter culture, testing conditions of sequences in vitro or in vivo, type of model and method of analysis. The bioactive peptides in our database have wide range of therapeutic potentials that includes antihypertensive, ACE-inhibitory, antioxidant, antimicrobial, immunomodulatory and cholesterol lowering peptides. These bioactive peptides were derived from different types of fermented foods that include milk, cheese, yogurt, wheat and rice. Numerous, web-based tools have been integrated to retrieve data, peptide mapping of proteins, similarity search and multiple-sequence alignment. This database will be useful for the food industry and researchers to explore full therapeutic potential of fermented foods from specific cultures.