ABSTRACT
Marine organisms are rich sources of structurally diverse compounds with various biological activities. With marine species comprising approximately a half of the total global biodiversity, the sea offers an enormous resource for novel compounds (Barrow and Shahidi, 2008). Recently, a great deal of interest has been developed to study the structural, compositional, and sequential properties of concerning bioactive peptides. Marine bioactive peptides can be produced by either one of the three methods, namely, solvent extraction, enzymatic hydrolysis, and microbial fermentation of food proteins (Lahl and Braun, 1994). Depending on the amino acid sequence, they may be involved in various biological functions (Clare and Swaisgood, 2000). Marine-derived bioactive peptides have been shown to possess many physiological functions, including antihypertensive or angiotensin I-converting enzyme inhibition (Je et al., 2005b), antioxidant (Mendis et al., 2005b), anticoagulant (Jo et al., 2008), and antimicrobial (Stensvag et al., 2008) activities. Moreover, some of these bioactive peptides have been identied to possess nutraceutical potentials for human health promotion and disease risk reduction (Shahidi and Zhong, 2008), and recently, the possible roles of food-derived bioactive peptides in reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease have been demonstrated (Erdmann et al., 2008). Bioactive peptides derived from marine organisms as well as marine sh processing by-products have potential in the development of functional foods (Shahidi, 2007), and they can act as potential physiological modulators of metabolism after absorption.
