Sobala (2024) introduces a new, comprehensive, and curated eukaryotic database. It consolidates information from EukProt (Richter et al. 2022) and various other resources to enhance Metazoa representation in existing protein databases. The preprint is of significant interest to the phylogenomics and comparative genomics communities, and I commend the author for their work.

LukProt, the expanded database, significantly increases the taxon sampling within holozoans. It integrates data from the previously assembled EukProt and AniProtDB (Barreira et al. 2021) databases, with additional datasets from early-diverging animal lineages such as ctenophores, sponges, and cnidarians. This effort will undoubtedly be useful for researchers investigating these clades and their origins, as well as for the broader field of comparative genomics.

The author provides both web-portal and command-line versions of the database, making it accessible to users with varying degrees of bioinformatic proficiency. The curation effort is commendable, and I believe the comparative genomics community, especially those interested in animal origins, will find LukProt to be a valuable resource.

References

Barreira SN, Nguyen A-D, Fredriksen MT, Wolfsberg TG, Moreland RT, Baxevanis AD (2021) AniProtDB: A collection of consistently generated metazoan proteomes for comparative genomics studies. Molecular Biology and Evolution 38, 4628–4633. https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msab165

Richter DJ, Berney C, Strassert JFH, Poh Y-P, Herman EK, Muñoz-Gómez SA, Wideman JG, Burki F, de Vargas C (2022) EukProt: A database of genome-scale predicted proteins across the diversity of eukaryotes. Peer Community Journal 2, e56. https://doi.org/10.24072/pcjournal.173

Sobala ŁF (2024) LukProt: A database of eukaryotic predicted proteins designed for investigations of animal origins. bioRxiv, ver. 2 peer-reviewed and recommended by Peer Community in Genomics. https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.01.30.577650