The employment of chemical agents in the food industry is raising several concerns
by consumers and is leading to an increasing interest in natural food preservatives.
Among alternatives, host defense peptides (HDPs) have attracted great interest for
their ability to preserve food samples from contamination without altering their
quality, taste, and organoleptic properties. Recently, we evaluated the applicability
of ApoB-derived peptides as novel food bio-preservatives and demonstrated their
ability to prevent chicken meat sample contamination when immobilized on chitosan
films. To perform a further step towards the applicability of these peptides in
the food field, here we evaluated peptides biosafety and digestibility. To do this,
we used a multidisciplinary approach including the evaluation of the peptides' toxicity
and antimicrobial activity, the analysis of resistance phenotype development,
an in silico prediction of the peptides' susceptibility to proteases and the evaluation
of the peptides' stability in simulated gastric and intestinal fluids. ApoB-derived
peptides were found to be nontoxic when tested on human gastric carcinoma cells
SNU-1 and on human colon-rectal adenocarcinoma cells HT-29, and not to induce
resistance phenotype in Salmonella strains. Bioinformatic analyses showed that the
peptides are susceptible to several proteases, as also confirmed by experiments in
simulated gastric and intestinal fluids. Altogether these findings open interesting
perspectives to the future applicability of ApoB-derived peptides as novel food
biopreservatives.

Title

Shurooq Ismail

Publisher

Wiley Periodicals LLC

Publisher Country

United States of America

Publication Type

Online only

Volume

24308

Year

2023

Pages

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