Back

Unraveling diversity by isolating peptide sequences specific to distinct taxonomic groups

Bochalis, E.; Patsakis, M.; Chantzi, N.; Mouratidis, I.; Chartoumpekis, D.; Georgakopoulos Soares, I.

2025-02-08 bioinformatics
10.1101/2025.02.05.636664 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The identification of succinct, universal fingerprints that enable the characterization of individual taxonomies can reveal insights into trait development and can have widespread applications in pathogen diagnostics, human healthcare, ecology and the characterization of biomes. Here, we investigated the existence of peptide k-mer sequences that are exclusively present in a specific taxonomy and absent in every other taxonomic level, termed taxonomic quasi-primes. By analyzing proteomes across 24,073 species, we identified quasi-prime peptides specific to superkingdoms, kingdoms, and phyla, uncovering their taxonomic distributions and functional relevance. These peptides exhibit remarkable sequence uniqueness at six- and seven-amino- acid lengths, offering insights into evolutionary divergence and lineage-specific adaptations. Moreover, we show that human quasi-prime loci are more prone to harboring pathogenic variants, underscoring their functional significance. This study introduces taxonomic quasi-primes and offers insights into their contributions to proteomic diversity, evolutionary pathways, and functional adaptations across the tree of life, while emphasizing their potential impact on human health and disease.

Matching journals

The top 11 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.