Bioactive peptides from amaranth seed protein hydrolysates induced apoptosis and antimigratory effects in breast cancer cells

摘要

Bioactive peptides are short chains of amino acids with positive health effects. Food proteins may be an important source of bioactive peptides. Pseudocereals contain a high amount of proteins. In the present study, proteins were isolated from the seeds of the pseudocereal, amaranth and the hydrolysates were prepared using simulated gastrointestinal digestion with the native and heat-denatured proteins. Heat denaturation increased the digestibility, released essential amino acids and peptides with antioxidant and free radical scavenging activity. Due to the high antioxidant activity of the protein hydrolysates prepared after heat denaturation followed by simulated digestion, the end product was used to measure the in vitro anticancer activity in human triplenegative breast cancer cells. The results indicated that the digested sample was capable of inhibiting cell growth with a GI(50) value of 48.3 +/- 0.2 mu g/ml. The protein hydrolysates also induced DNA fragmentation, membrane integrity loss, phosphatidylserine translocation and caspase 3 activity in the treated cells. It inhibited cell migration across an artificial wound created in the cell monolayer. Therefore, amaranth may be a good source of bioactive peptides with good antioxidant activity and promising anticancer activity.