getTaxonomicDistribution

Show how an entry is distributed across the NCBI taxonomy, as a tree of UniProt protein counts. The tree starts at the superkingdoms / domains (Eukaryota, Bacteria, Archaea, Viruses) and descends by rank (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species). Answers “is this domain bacterial or eukaryote-specific?” (read the top level) and “exactly where does it occur?”

Arguments

Name	Type	Required	Description
accession	string	yes	Entry accession, e.g. IPR000719 or PF00069. The source database is resolved automatically from the accession.
depth	integer	no	How many taxonomic levels to return, counting the superkingdom / domain level as 1 (2 adds kingdoms, 3 phyla, …). Omit for the full tree down to species.
minProteins	integer	no	Only include taxa with at least this many matching proteins (prunes the long tail of rare lineages). Default 0.

Warning

The full tree can be very large for ubiquitous domains. For a high-level answer pass a small depth (e.g. 1 or 2) and/or a minProteins threshold rather than downloading the whole tree.

Returns

A JSON summary with accession, name, source_database, total_proteins, total_species, the requested depth (a number, or "full"), an optional min_proteins, a node_count, and a nested distribution array. Each node has taxId, name (or "unclassified" for synthetic nodes), rank, proteins, percent (of total_proteins), species, and children until the depth limit is reached.

{
  "accession": "IPR000719",
  "name": "Protein kinase domain",
  "total_proteins": 1954321,
  "depth": 1,
  "distribution": [
    { "taxId": "2759", "name": "Eukaryota", "rank": "superkingdom",
      "proteins": 1799900, "percent": 92.09, "species": 41234 },
    { "taxId": "2", "name": "Bacteria", "rank": "superkingdom",
      "proteins": 151200, "percent": 7.74, "species": 8123 }
  ]
}

Examples

• accession="IPR000719", depth=1: the four-way superkingdom breakdown (fast; answers “eukaryotic or bacterial?”).

• accession="PF00069", depth=2, minProteins=50000: kingdoms, dropping rare lineages.

• accession="IPR000001": the full tree for a lineage-specific domain (small enough to return in full).