Noteworthy Consensus Effects of D/E Residues in Umami Peptides Used for Designing the Novel Umami Peptides

Aspartic acid (D) and glutamic acid (E) play vital roles in the umami peptides. To understand their exact mechanism of action, umami peptides were collected and cut into 1/2/3/4 fragments. Connecting D/E to the N/C-termini of the fragments formed D/E consensus effect groups (DEEGs), and all fragments containing DEEG were summarized according to the ratio and ranking obtained in the above four situations. The interaction patterns between peptides in DEEG and T1R1/T1R3-VFD were compared by statistical analysis and molecular docking, and the most conservative contacts were found to be HdB_277_ARG and HdB_148_SER. The molecular docking score of the effector peptides significantly dropped compared to that of their original peptides (-1.076 ± 0.658 kcal/mol, p value < 0.05). Six types of consensus fingerprints were set according to the Top7 contacts. The exponential of relative umami was linearly correlated with ΔG_bind (R² = 0.961). Under the D/E consensus effect, the electrostatic effect of the umami peptide was improved, and the energy gap between the highest occupied molecular orbital-the least unoccupied molecular orbital (HOMO-LUMO) was decreased. The shortest path map showed that the peptides had similar T1R1-T1R3 recognition pathways. This study helps to reveal umami perception rules and provides support for the efficient screening of umami peptides based on the material richness in D/E sequences.