Background: Collagen is the most abundant protein in animals and can be obtained from residues of the food industry. Its hydrolysate has many desirable properties that make it suitable as an additive in foods and cosmetics, or as a component of scaffold materials to be used in biomedicine.

Results: We report here the characterization of type I collagen from five different sources, namely bovine, porcine, chicken, trout and salmon, as well as their hydrolysates by means of bioinformatics tools. As expected, the results showed that bovine and porcine collagen, as well as trout and salmon collagen, can be used interchangeably due to their high identity. This result is consistent with the evolution of proteins with highly identical sequences between related species. Also, 156 sequences were found as potential bioactive peptides, 126 from propeptide region and 30 from the central domain, according to the comparison with reported active sequences.

Conclusions: Collagen analysis from a bioinformatic approach allowed us to classify collagen from 5 different animal sources, to establish its interchangeability as potential additive in diverse fields and also to determine the content of bioactive peptides from its in silico hydrolysis.