LAUSR

Bioaccesibility and bioavailability of food derived bioactive compounds are important issues for the assessment of their in vivo physiological health promoting effects. Food components such as proteins and peptides are exposed to different proteases and peptidases during gastrointestinal digestion and absorption. Therefore, different in vitro approaches have been developed to evaluate bioaccesibility and stability of bioactive peptides. The static simulated gastrointestinal digestion model (SGD) was widely reported to assess bioaccesibility of bioactive peptides. On the other hand, although the dynamic SGD model may better simulate human digestion, it has been scarcely explored in bioaccesibility studies of food bioactive peptides due to its high cost and lack of standardization. For bioavailability studies, the Caco-2 cell monolayer model has been extensively used for the assessment of food bioactive peptides. In fact, very few reports using alternate methods for determining transepithelial transport of bioactive peptides have been employed. In this sense, ex vivo tissue-based models such as the Ussing chamber and the everted sac gut have been used. Current evidence supports the fact that using SGD with cell-based models for evaluating bioaccesibility, absorption and bioavailability of food-derived bioactive peptides, is the most used approach. Nevertheless, SGD with ex vivo tissue-based models such as the everted sac, remains to be further explored since it seems to be the model that better mimics the physiological process, besides being fast, inexpensive and several compounds may be tested simultaneously. In the present review, we discuss available information on the different in vitro approaches for the determination of bioaccesibility and bioavailability of food-derived bioactive peptides with special emphasis on ex vivo tissue-based models such as the everted sac and the Ussing chamber models. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.