Soy proteins as potential source of active peptides of nutraceutical significance

Soy bean is a well-recognized food item that is consumed all over the world. Nutritionally, soybean proteins contain a complete range of essential amino acids that make them comparable to other proteins from animal and plant sources. Hence the reason for its importance in human diet. Abundant literature demon-strates that the soy protein-derived peptides display several physiological activities including antihypertensive, antioxidative, immunomodulating, hypocholesterol-emic, and anticancer properties and hence are of great importance in the develop-ment of pharmacologically active constituents and functional foods. Therefore, these peptides offer significant prospect for application in food and pharmaceu-tical industry. However, their enzymatic production, purification and characterization are time-consuming and expensive processes. Also, the quantity of active peptides produced from hydrolysis of food/soy proteins depends on the number of occurrences of the desired peptide sequences within the parent proteins and the specificity of the enzymes used in hydrolysis. The yield of bioactive peptides produced by this method is usually low and more advanced methodologies/technologies are required to improve their yield. This chapter is devoted to review the literature to identify and describe the available methodologies for the identification and production of bioactive peptides from soybean proteins. The potential applications of soy protein-derived bioactive peptides as functional foods and therapeutic agents will also be emphasized in this chapter.