Food-derived calcium chelating peptides: Biological functional components for better calcium bioavailability

Food-derived calcium chelating peptides (CCPs), as a new generation of calcium supplements, offer a promising strategy for addressing the challenge of human calcium nutrition. They are natural and have low toxicity, effectively solving the problems of poor calcium absorption and low bioavailability in the body. Therefore, they have high application value and development prospects in the food industry. This review provided a comprehensive overview from the preparation, purification, and identification to the evaluation of CCPs. The structure-function relationship of CCPs and emerging technologies for estimating CCPs are summarized, with a focus on exploring the gastrointestinal stability of CCPs, the mechanism of promoting calcium absorption, and the progress in improving calcium bioavailability. Conventional purification and identification of CCPs are costly and time-consuming. To overwhelm this challenge, computer-aided mathematical models, quantum mechanical calculations, bioinformatics, and real-time updated protein/peptide databases have been extensively investigated and utilized. However, the effective use of these tools relies on the awareness of the structure-function relationship of CCPs. Currently, an increasing number of CCPs have been discovered from various food sources, and providing insight into the effects of CCPs on calcium bioavailability has special significance for them as functional ingredients or calcium preparations. Future studies should focus on the commercial production of food proteins-derived CCPs on a large scale, comprehensively studying the structure-function relationship of CCPs and validating their health benefits in the human body.