Why use LUCApedia

Thanks to the growth of genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics, it is possible to investigate early life through a range of methods. LUCApedia was established to aggregate and unify the results of studies aimed at describing early life through a variety of bioinformatics approaches and pair them with a number of enzymological characteristics predicted in previous studies to reflect catalysts important in the early evolution of life. Users may query the webserver for individual proteins to rapidly identify evidence of deep ancestry. Advanced users may download the database as a series of flat files and use it to discover trends in early evolution or test hypotheses related to ancient life.

Underlying database framework

Datasets corresponding to studies predicting characteristics of the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) or earlier forms of life consist of different data types: Protein structures, protein domain folds, clusters of orthologous genes, enzyme functions, etc. In order to use these data in concert, they must be organized into a common framework. We achieve this unification by mapping these datasets to Uniprot IDs (also called “entry names”) and then using these Uniprot IDs to group predictions via EggNOG Clusters. The Uniprot entries represent individual proteins while the EggNOG clusters represent families of proteins.

More information about each specific dataset