Inflammation is considered to be a crucial factor in the development of chronic diseases, eight of which were listed among the top ten causes of death worldwide in the World Health Organization’s World Health Statistics 2019. Moreover, traditional drugs for inflammation are often linked to undesirable side effects. As gentler alternatives to traditional anti-inflammatory drugs, plant-derived bioactive peptides have been shown to be effective interventions against various chronic diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, cardiovascular disease and cancer. However, an adequate and systematic review of the structures and anti-inflammatory activities of plant-derived bioactive peptides has been lacking. This paper reviews the latest research on plant-derived anti-inflammatory peptides (PAPs), mainly including the specific regulatory mechanisms of PAPs; the structure–activity relationships of PAPs; and their enzymatic processing based on the structure–activity relationships. Moreover, current research problems for PAPs are discussed, such as the shallow exploration of mechanisms, enzymatic solution determination difficulty, low yield and unknown in vivo absorption and metabolism and proposed future research directions. This work aims to provide a reference for functional activity research, nutritional food development and the clinical applications of PAPs.

Soybean dreg is a by-product of soybean products production, with a large consumption in China. Low utilization value leads to random discarding, which is one of the important sources of urban pollution. In this work, porous biochar was synthesized using a one-pot method and potassium bicarbonate (KHCO₃) with low-cost soybean dreg (SD) powder as the carbon precursor to investigating the adsorption of methylene blue (MB). The prepared samples were characterized with scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), elemental analyzer (EA), Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET), X-ray diffractometer (XRD), Raman spectroscopy (Raman), Fourier transform infrared spectrometer (FTIR), and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). The obtained SDB-K-3 showed a high specific surface area of 1620 m² g⁻¹, a large pore volume of 0.7509 cm³ g⁻¹, and an average pore diameter of 1.859 nm. The results indicated that the maximum adsorption capacity of SDB-K-3 to MB could reach 1273.51 mg g⁻¹ at 318 K. The kinetic data were most consistent with the pseudo-second-order model and the adsorption behavior was more suitable for the Langmuir isotherm equation. This study demonstrated that the porous biochar adsorbent can be prepared from soybean dreg by high value utilization, and it could hold significant potential for dye wastewater treatment in the future.