Shedding light on the dark proteome
Around half of all human proteins are a mystery. What do they look like, asks Phil Ball
We don’t know what a large chunk of the proteins studied so far actually do. Some don’t even look like what we think proteins should look like. Is that a fault of the way we’ve studied them so far (not all proteins lend themselves to be crystallised and studied by diffraction, for example), or is it a deeper problem? What will we discover when we uncover the secrets of the dark proteome?