Antihypertensive and Antidiabetic Drug Candidates from Milkfish (Chanos chanos)—Identification and Characterization through an Integrated Bioinformatic Approach

Integrated bioinformatics tools have created more efficient and robust methods to overcome in vitro challenges and have been widely utilized for the investigation of food proteins and the generation of peptide sequences. This study aimed to analyze the physicochemical properties and bioactivities of novel peptides derived from hydrolyzed milkfish (<i>Chanos chanos</i>) protein sequences and to discover their potential angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE)- and dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DPPIV)-inhibitory activities using machine learning-based tools, including BIOPEP-UWM, PeptideRanker, and the molecular docking software HADDOCK 2.4. Nine and three peptides were predicted to have ACE- and DPPIV-inhibitory activities, respectively. The DPPIV-inhibitory peptides were predicted to inhibit the compound with no known specific mode. Meanwhile, two tetrapeptides (MVWH and PPPS) were predicted to possess a competitive mode of ACE inhibition by directly binding to the tetra-coordinated Zn ion. Among all nine discovered ACE-inhibitory peptides, only the PPPS peptide satisfied the drug-likeness analysis requirements with no violations of the Lipinski rule of five and should be further investigated in vitro.