Methodologies for extraction and separation of short-chain bioactive peptides

Bioactive short-chain peptides are present in food, some of them with health promoting properties, taste contribution, and also useful as biomarkers for the authentication of food, and even proposed as disease biomarkers. Their enrichment, separation and identification are notoriously difficult by conventional peptidomics approaches both because they are usually present at low concentration and are hidden by high abundance compounds but also because short-chain peptides suffer from ion suppression during electrospray ionisation. This book chapters aims to describe some innovative and recent developed strategies to overcome the analytical issues related to the determination of small peptides. In particular, two different carbonaceous materials, such as graphitized carbon black and porous graphitic carbon, are presented and the advantages and troubleshooting in their use as solid phase extraction and chromatographic separation phases are described in detail and discussed.