GoKawiilSome proteins (artist’s illustration) are being reclassified in databases as a result of the latest findings.Credit: Christoph Burgstedt/Getty
The human genome contains around 20,000 genes that hold instructions for making working proteins, as most genetic databases now indicate. However, some scientists say there might be thousands more ‘dark proteins’ with unknown but potentially important roles in cells.
These proteins, the code for which has been translated from portions of the genome that weren’t thought to produce proteins, were excluded from official genome and protein counts.
An effort announced today in Nature1 gives thousands of these molecules encoded by the human genome an official, new name — peptideins — and marks their inclusion in major gene and protein databases used by the life-sciences community.
Researchers say the rebranding will bring much-needed attention and effort to working out what different peptideins do in cells. Some have been implicated in diseases including childhood cancers, as well as in basic cellular functions.
‘Dark proteins’ hiding in our cells could hold clues to cancer and other diseases
But what most of them do is unknown, although there is some evidence that many peptideins — previously called microproteins or non-canonical, ‘dark’ proteins — are cellular by-products without a clear function.
“This is a major breakthrough,” says Christoph Dietrich, a bioinformatician at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. “These microproteins have the potential to really open up a new wave of research.”
Short and mysterious
Dark proteins tend to be very short in amino acid length and lack evolutionary relatives in other organisms, which is part of the reason they have been omitted from protein-coding gene and proteome databases. In many cases, they are encoded by genes that are very near to, or in some cases overlapping with known, protein-coding genes.
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