Toxin data quality: a critical examination of bacterial exotoxins and animal toxins

Our analysis revealed biophysical differences between animal and bacterial toxins that should not be ignored. Both toxin groups exhibited preferencial amino acid usage depending on their origin, together with higher cysteine content compared to their respective controls. The animal toxins set contains, on average, significantly shorter sequences than bacterial toxins, and had their isoelectric point shifted towards acidic pH values. We show that animal toxins and bacterial toxins possess intrinsic differences in general biophysical properties, which reinforce the necessity of segregating these datasets to ensure reliability of bioinformatics models aimed at understanding and predicting toxin characteristics.