ABSTRACT
Proteins are sources of many peptides with diverse biological activity. Such peptides are considered as valuable components of foods with desired and designed biological activity. Two strategies are currently recommended for research in the area of biological activity of food protein fragments. The first strategy covers investigations on products of enzymic hydrolysis of proteins. The second one is synthesis of peptides identical with protein fragments and investigations using these peptides. It is possible to predict biological activity of protein fragments using sequence alignments between proteins and biologically active peptides from database. Our database contains currently 527 sequences of bioactive peptides with antihypertensive, opioid, immunomodulating and other activities. The sequence alignments can give information about localization of biologically active fragments in protein chain, but not about possibilities of enzymic release of such fragments. The information is thus equivalent with this obtained using synthetic peptides identical with protein fragments. Possibilities offered by the database are discussed using wheat alpha/beta-gliadin, bovine beta-lactoglobulin and bovine beta-casein (including influence of genetic polymorphism and genetic engineering on amino acid sequences) as examples.