“…The pipeline proposed in this study allows discriminating host, residual food, and microbiome proteins, and identifies the main taxa and their functions at an unprecedented range, including archaea, bacteria, fungi, and parasites. This approach gives more flexibility in database construction, cascade layout, and parameter optimization than currently available tools such as Unipept 5 , MetaLab 15 , MPA 30 , or ProteoClade 31 , which have not been specifically conceived for the analysis of microbiomes from nonsequenced hosts. We believe this strategy can be of great value for future microbiome studies of numerous non-model animals, providing a valid alternative for studies in diverse areas such as environmental biomonitoring, aquaculture, parasitology, or biocontrol.…”