Challenges in the quantitation of naturally generated bioactive peptides in processed meats

The progress in the identification and characterisation of the activity of natural bioactive peptides is highly dependent on modern instruments and bioinformatics tools as well as updated protein databases. In fact, the use of in silico approaches and proteomics can be complementary tools in the identification of peptides from meat protein sources as the empirical experimental design can be simplified by using bioinformatics for computer simulation in most of the steps. Finally, Multiple Reaction Monitoring mass spectrometry methodology previously used in the quantitation of therapeutic peptides and biomarkers arises as a powerful tool for absolute quantitation or semi-quantitation of bioactive peptides.