In Silico Identification of Antimicrobial Peptides in the Proteomes of Goat and Sheep Milk and Feta Cheese.

Marios Tomazou,George Th Tsangaris,Anastasis Oulas,Athanasios K Anagnostopoulos,George M Spyrou

doi:10.3390/proteomes7040032

Marios Tomazou, George Th Tsangaris + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/proteomes7040032

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Abstract

Milk and dairy products are a major functional food group of growing scientific and commercial interest due to their nutritional value and bioactive “load”. A major fraction of the latter is attributed to milk’s rich protein content and its biofunctional peptides that occur naturally during digestion. On the basis of the identified proteome datasets of milk whey from sheep and goat breeds in Greece and feta cheese obtained during previous work, we applied an in silico workflow to predict and characterise the antimicrobial peptide content of these proteomes. We utilised existing tools for predicting peptide sequences with antimicrobial traits complemented by in silico protein cleavage modelling to identify frequently occurring antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract in humans. The peptides of interest were finally assessed for their stability with respect to their susceptibility to cleavage by endogenous proteases expressed along the intestinal part of the GI tract and ranked with respect to both their antimicrobial and stability scores.

Highlights

A growing body of evidence suggests that milk and dairy products have unique metabolic, signalling and antimicrobial effects, beside their high nutritional content
While evidence supporting the bioactive potential of milk and other food-derived peptides is accumulating, it remains unclear if the peptides of interest (a) can withstand the high proteolytic activity in the gastrointestinal tract for long enough to exert an effect before being fully degraded and (b) their permeability through the intestinal epithelium is such that they can reach the target tissue or organ at physiologically relevant concentrations
The same protein sequences were digested in silico to identify which peptides that can occur in the GI tract, matched the predicted AMPA stretches

Summary

Introduction

A growing body of evidence suggests that milk and dairy products have unique metabolic, signalling and antimicrobial effects, beside their high nutritional content. While evidence supporting the bioactive potential of milk and other food-derived peptides is accumulating, it remains unclear if the peptides of interest (a) can withstand the high proteolytic activity in the gastrointestinal tract for long enough to exert an effect before being fully degraded and (b) their permeability through the intestinal epithelium is such that they can reach the target tissue or organ at physiologically relevant concentrations. It has been suggested in a critical evaluation that di- and tripeptides can permeate the intestinal epithelium and exert a biological function; there is not yet convincing evidence supporting the same for longer. The latter could be considered as an important aspect in maintaining a healthy

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