LukProt: A database of eukaryotic predicted proteins designed for investigations of animal origins

Abstract

AbstractThe origins and early evolution of animals is a subject with many outstanding questions. One problem faced by researchers trying to answer them is the absence of a comprehensive database with sequences from non-bilaterians. Publicly available data is plentiful but scattered and often not associated with proper metadata. A new database presented in this paper, LukProt, is an attempt at solving this issue. The database contains protein sequences obtained mostly from genomic, transcriptomic and metagenomic studies and is an extension of EukProt (Richter et al., 2022,Peer Community Journal,2, e56). LukProt adopts the EukProt naming conventions and includes data from 216 additional animals. The database is associated with a taxonomic grouping (taxogroup) scheme suitable for studying early animal evolution. Minor updates to the database will contain species additions or metadata corrections and major updates will synchronize LukProt to each new version of EukProt and releases are permanently stored on Zenodo. A BLAST server to search the database is available athttps://lukprot.hirszfeld.pl/. Users are invited to participate in maintaining and correcting LukProt. As it can be searched without downloading locally, the database can be a convenient resource not only for evolutionary biologists, but for the broader scientific community as well.Graphical abstractSignificance statementLukProt is a sequence database aiming to accelerate the research on the evolution of animals by cutting the time-consuming step of assembling sequences from disparate sources. Non-bilaterians are currently not well covered by general purpose databases, despite plentiful, public sequencing data. These data were integrated into a consistently curated database, presented here. It can be downloaded and used locally or used via a public BLAST search server. A clear taxonomic framework is also introduced, as well as scripts to aid local data analyses. LukProt will be publicly available on Zenodo, kept up to date and synchronized with each new version of its parent database, EukProt.