F. Boonekamp et al., (2019) describe an innocuous watermarking strategy for coding regions that enables the discrimination of DNA and mRNA by sequencing through a k-mer approach and facilitates selective editing of watermarked and non-watermarked sequences. Shot-gun proteomics (LFQ) was performed on the parent and the engineered yeast strain. *Corresponding author: Pascale Daran-Lapujade (p.a.s.daran-lapujade@tudelft.nl). Department of Biotechnology, Delft University of Technology, van der Maasweg 9, 2629HZ Delft, The Netherlands