Investigation of bioactive peptides from Scolymus hispanicus by using in silico methods

Abstract

Due to increases in the soil pollution related to agricultural areas, the interests on the wild edible greens have been increasing nowadays. Scolymus hispanicus (=Golden thistle) is a wild edible plant which is widely and naturally spread in Türkiye. An in silico-based bioinformatics approach has been proposed for the evaluation of bioactive peptides from this species. In silico digestion and also bioactive peptides of RubisCO from S.hispanicus were studied by using BIOPEP-UWM. Protparam and Clustal Omega were also used to determine physicochemical parameters and sequence similarity, respectively. The AE values related to angiotensin converting enzyme and dipeptidyl peptidase-IV were 0.0847 and 0.1059 after in silico pepsin digestion (pH>2), respectively. While the antioxidant property obtained after pepsin (pH>2) digestion was found to be 0.0127, the value of 0.042 was obtained for ficin on this parameter. BIOPEP-UWM also exhibit important properties related to the bioactivities of the peptides such as antioxidant, dipeptidyl peptidase-IV and angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitions. From the results, it could be said that S. hispanicus has very important bioactive peptides which could be evaluated in the production of functional foods. Moreover, isolated bioactive peptides and also secondary metabolites can also be utilized in pharmaceutical industry. Further in vitro and in vivo studies are strongly recommended on S. hispanicus.