The bioactivity assessment of foodborne peptides is currently a research area of great relevance, and, in particular, several studies are devoted to the antihypertensive effects through the inhibition of angiotensin I converting enzyme (ACE). In the present work, a straightforward workflow to identify inhibitory peptides from food matrices is proposed, which involves a hybrid in vitro/in silico tandem approach. Parma dry-cured ham was chosen as case study. In particular, the advantage of using the hybrid approach to identify active sequences (in comparison to the experimental trials alone) has been pointed out. Specifically, fractions obtained by in vitro gastrointestinal digestion of ham samples of 18 and 24 months of aging have been assessed for ACE inhibition. At the same time, the released peptidomic profiles, which cannot be entirely evaluated by using in vitro assays, have been screened for the inhibition by using an in silico model. Then, to identify novel inhibitory sequences, a series of strong candidates have been synthesized and assessed for their inhibitory activity through in vitro assay. On the one hand, the use of computational simulations appeared to be an effective strategy to find active sequences, as confirmed by in vitro analysis. On the other hand, strong inhibitory sequences were identified for the first time in Parma dry-cured ham (e.g., LGL and SFVTT with IC50 values of 145 and 395 μM, respectively), which is a product of international dietary and economic relevance. Therefore, these findings demonstrate the usefulness of in silico methodologies coupled to in vitro tests for the identification of potentially bioactive peptides, and they give an important contribution to the study of the overall nutritional value of Parma ham.
Keywords: ACE; bioactive peptides; dry-cured ham; in silico study; molecular modeling.