Discovery of novel marine enzymes and bioactive peptides from marine and other food sources

这项拟议的研究旨在找到独特的海洋酶，用于生产新的生物肽，用于管理食品质量、食品安全和非传染性疾病（如肥胖和某些慢性病）。生物肽可以通过化学或发酵过程生产，但酶的方法具有更高的特异性、易于控制、产量更高和形成更一致的产物的优点。然而，常用的酶不能有效地水解天然蛋白分子，并且需要事先处理底物以使其更适合蛋白水解，这增加了生产成本，并且还会产生变性蛋白肽。我们之前对无胃鱼酶的研究表明，这些独特的酶可以避免预处理步骤，更经济有效地生产具有独特结构和功能特性的新型生物活性肽。

The proposed study seeks to find unique marine enzymes to be used to produce novel biopeptides for potential applications to manage food quality, food safety, and non-communicable diseases such as obesity and certain chronic conditions. Biopeptides can be produced by chemical or fermentation processes, but the enzymatic approach has the advantages of higher specificity, ease of control, higher yields and formation of more consistent products. However, the commonly used enzymes do not hydrolyze native protein molecules efficiently and require prior treatments of the substrates to make them more amenable to proteolysis, which add to the production cost and also produce denatured protein peptides. Our previous studies on stomachless fish enzymes suggest that these unique enzymes can be used to obviate the pretreatment steps and produce novel bioactive peptides with distinct structural and functional properties more cost-effectively.