Bioactive Peptides From the Cucurbitaceae Family: From Identification and Health-Promoting Functions to Industrial Utilization.

Cucurbitaceae is a major plant family within the kingdom Plantae, encompassing popular food crops such as zucchini, squash, pumpkins, and melons. With the growing interest in discovering novel bioactive peptides (BPs) from various plant sources, Cucurbitaceae crops have emerged as a popular candidate for isolating nutrient-enriched peptides due to their diverse applications in the nutritional and pharmaceutical sectors, with experimentally evidenced antihypertensive, antidiabetic, antimicrobial, and anticancer properties. However, current investigations are limited to a few economically important species and are seed-centric within this family, with limited in vivo and clinical validations for their in vitro functional properties. In this review, we have summarized the peer-reviewed original proteomic research and reviews, written in English, reported to date on peptide production from protein extraction to hydrolysis, identification, and functional characterization, as well as their industrial translation, excluding those without a standard functional validation. This work discusses and evaluates the applied protocols, limitations, and challenges in BP discovery and industrial utilization, highlighting understudied cucurbits as a potential source of novel BPs and insights into broadening future research scopes and providing opportunities aligned with plant-derived peptide discovery.