The Metaproteomics Initiative: five years of community-driven progress

The Metaproteomics Initiative was officially launched in 2021 to strengthen collaboration, promote knowledge exchange, and support and lead standardization efforts within the growing metaproteomics community. Over the past 5 years, the Initiative has developed into a structured, global network of researchers. It has launched community-driven benchmark studies, helped shape emerging metadata and reporting standards, developed practical guidance and training materials, organized international symposia, and fostered connections across the microbiome research landscape (https://metaproteomics.org/). We outline the Initiative’s organization, activities, achievements, and ongoing efforts, and reflect on how sustained, community-led coordination has shaped the development of metaproteomics as a field. We further position the Grand Metaproteome Challenges as a next step toward coordinated, community-scale biological research, aimed at advancing functional microbiome studies across clinical, industrial, and environmental application domains, and invite engagement from the wider microbiome and omics communities.