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bioRxiv · 10.64898/2026.02.24.707692

Evaluation of Protein Reference Database Reduction and Its Impact on Peptide-Centric Metaproteomics

Vande Moortele, T.·Van de Vyver, S.·Binke, B.-B.·Van Den Bossche, T.·Dawyndt, P.·Martens, L.·Mesuere, B.·Verschaffelt, P.
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Abstract

Metaproteomics identifies the proteins present in a microbial community and, from them, which organisms are active and what functions they carry out. Tools such as Unipept assign peptides to taxa and functions by matching them to UniProtKB proteins and taking the lowest common ancestor of the matching taxa, deriving functional annotations from the same matches. This analysis therefore depends directly on the content of UniProtKB, which was substantially restructured in 2025-2026, reducing it by more than 100 million protein entries. We investigated how these changes affect taxonomic interpretation and how restricting the database to sample-specific taxa identified by rRNA profiling modifies that effect. Fixed, non-redundant peptide lists from human-gut and marine-hatchery studies were reanalysed with Unipept against UniProtKB releases 2025_03, 2025_04, and 2026_02. Peptide mapping coverage fell from 85.9% to 73.3% (gut) and from 82.3% to 68.7% (marine) between release 2025_03 and 2026_02, yet dominant taxonomic profiles remained robust: family- and genus-level distributions changed little and all 15 dominant gut species were retained. Root-level assignments dropped from 18.7% to 7.0% (gut) and 25.8% to 14.3% (marine). Restricting UniProtKB 2026_02 to taxa detected by large-subunit ribosomal RNA (LSU rRNA) profiling reduced coverage to 64.4% (gut) and 41.8% (marine), while genus- and species-level proportions changed by less than one percentage point. The major UniProtKB restructuring of 2025-2026 therefore narrowed mapping breadth without destabilizing the dominant taxonomic profiles in these two datasets.

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Vande Moortele, T., Van de Vyver, S., Binke, B.-B., Van Den Bossche, T., Dawyndt, P., Martens, L., Mesuere, B., Verschaffelt, P.. 2026-02-25. Evaluation of Protein Reference Database Reduction and Its Impact on Peptide-Centric Metaproteomics. https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.02.24.707692

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