# PepLab Platform: Database and Software Tools for Analysis of Food-Derived Bioactive Peptides
###### Abstract  
Research on food-derived bioactive peptides is expanding and the need for a convenient online platform that combines a foolproof and intuitive user interface with a reliable database and tools for prediction and analysis is rising. In this regard, this paper presents an open-access web-based platform PepLab (Peptides Laboratory). The database contains 2764 peptide sequence entries, grouped into sixteen classes according to their biological activity and into seven classes according to the source from which they were derived. Moreover, it includes bioinformatic tools for their processing and analysis. The DMperp tool allows extracting information about a number of physicochemical characteristics of a peptide or a set of peptides, including those that are not recorded in the database. The main advantages of PepLab are a user-friendly interface, a responsive design, and optimized search engines for better visibility on the Internet. Prediction of non-reported activity is available based on amino acid sequence analysis. In addition, users can download data and results in a convenient format (text and/or graphic) that was limited in the existing platforms. In this way, the presented PepLab platform will be helpful for researchers from various fields--bioinformatics, pharmaceuticals, food sciences, dietetics, biotechnology, analytical chemistry, etc. bioactive peptides; database; computer science; information systems; web tool; bioinformatics; biochemistry; food science +
Footnote †: journal: Medical  
about precisely this type of peptides and, accordingly, to the creation of databases containing such information. A literature search was done in PubMed, Web of Science, and Elsevier ScienceDirect databases using several keywords: \"food-derived peptides\" (19,443, 16,793, and 7011 results respectively), \"bioactive peptides from food\" (5846, 4181, and 5145 results respectively), and \"bioactive peptides database\" (632, 2635, and 696 results respectively). It must be concluded that currently, there are a limited number of open-access databases focused on bioactive peptides derived from foods: BIOPEP-UWM [7,8], APD3 [9], AHT-PDB [10], PlantPepDB [11], PeptideDB [12], CancerPPD [13], BioPepDB [14], MBPDB [15], DFBP [16], and FermFooDB [17]. The study of different peptide sequences, by in silico or in vitro methods, requires the availability of correct FDBP data. After researching publicly available databases and data sets, it was found that they have the following shortcomings:  
* in some of the public databases, there is duplication of information in the various records;
* in some of the public databases, contradictory and even incorrect information about bioactive peptides is noticed;
* in the different databases, a given peptide is said to have different biological activities, i.e., it is beneficial to collect the information about all the studied activities for it;
* there is insufficient information on the physicochemical properties of peptides, and the available information often has errors in some indicators;
* there is no possibility (with few exceptions) to extract information from a given random peptide sequence, or present it graphically;
* not all of the presented tools work correctly, and in some cases, there is even no access to some tools at all;
* existing peptide databases do not offer optimization, so when entering a peptide sequence into Internet search engines, no information about it can be found, both in one-letter format and in three-letter format. In order to overcome these shortcomings, a web-based open access platform PepLab (www.pep-lab.info, accessed on 4 December 2022) was created. It includes a database of biologically active peptides extracted from food and software tools for their processing and analysis. PepLab's database contains several thousand peptide sequence records, and the information on them is updated daily or new peptides are added. Each peptide has been checked by comparison with available biological activity databases as well as in the scientific literature.