Revealed: the mysterious ‘dark’ proteins that might play a big role in biology

‘Dark’ portions of the genome, which weren’t thought to hold instructions for making working proteins, have mostly been excluded from research. Now thousands of the proteins encoded by these genes have an official, new name — peptideins — that marks their inclusion in major gene and protein databases used by the life-sciences community. 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.