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Introduction: Mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics data cover 1,000s of proteins and facilitate the study of a multitude of post-translational modifications (PTMs) such as ubiquitination, phosphorylation, and acetylation. The latter are core in our current understanding of disease patho-mechanisms [for full text, please go to the a.m. URL]

We report on a first next-to-next-to-leading order calculation of the decay constants of the $D$ ($D^*$) and $B$ ($B^*$) mesons using a covariant formulation of chiral perturbation theory. It is shown that, using the state-of-the-art lattice QCD results on $f_{D_s}/f_D$ as input, one can predict quantitatively the ratios of $f_{D_s^*}/f_{D^*}$, $f_{B_s}/f_B$, and $f_{B^*_s}/f_{B^*}$ taking into account heavy-quark spin-flavor symmetry breaking effects on the relevant low-energy constants. The predicted relations between these ratios, $f_{D^*_s}/f_{D^*}f_{D_s}/f_D$, and their light-quark mass dependence should be testable in future lattice QCD simulations, providing a stringent test of our understanding of heavy quark spin-flavor symmetry, chiral symmetry and their breaking patterns., Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables; typos corrected, clarifications added, results remaining unchanged