UniProt uses a modified version of the NCBI Taxonomy (see UniProt Taxonomy) which:
- Uses an alternative authority for some taxa. Thus different scientific and common names are used for those taxa in UniProt, the names used in NCBI Taxonomy (and thus in INSDC) are handled as synonyms.
- Additional taxa. Since UniProt receives submissions of protein sequences, it sometimes has to provide a taxonomy node before the organism is available in the NCBI Taxonomy.
The taxonomy identifiers (e.g. 9606 for Homo sapiens) should be consistent between the two taxonomies so mapping between them should be simple.
The handling of archaeological taxa is always a matter of conjecture, since any classification is based on limited information and are subject to change as more examples are discovered and examined. The case of early humans it is unclear what the evolutionary relationships are since few examples are known (see Homo (genus))). For the moment NCBI Taxonomy has placed Denisova and Neanderthal as subspecies, presumably because this makes certain types of searches and analysis easier (e.g. using Homo sapiens to provide a reference genome), as the sequence data for these species improves this positioning will likely change to incorporate the new information.