Recent trends in the analysis of bioactive peptides in milk and dairy products

Food-derived constituents represent important sources of several classes of bioactive compounds. Among them peptides have gained great attention in the last two decades thanks to the scientific evidence of their beneficial effects on health in addition to their established nutritional value. Several functionalities for bioactive peptides have been described, including antioxidative, antihypertensive, anti-inflammatory, immunomodulatory, and antimicrobial activity. They are now considered as novel and potential dietary ingredients to promote human health, though in some cases they may also have detrimental effects on health. Bioactive peptides can be naturally occurring, produced in vitro by enzymatic hydrolysis, and formed in vivo during gastrointestinal digestion of proteins. Thus, the need to gain a better understanding of the positive health effects of food peptides has prompted the development of analytical strategies for their isolation, separation, and identification in complex food matrices. Dairy products and milk are potential sources of bioactive peptides: several of them possess extra-nutritional physiological functions that qualify them to be classified under the functional food label. In this trends article we briefly describe the state-of-the-art of peptidomics methods for the identification and discovery of bioactive peptides, also considering recent progress in their analysis and highlighting the difficulty in the analysis of short amino acid sequences and endogenous peptides.