A recent CSIRO press release, “Secrets of the dark proteome” , features work by Sean O’Donoghue, a data visualisation scientist with CSIRO and the Garvan Institute, and his collaborators on proteins. The naming of these dark proteins – ie proteins with completely unknown structure – was inspired by the analogy to dark matter. For details see the research paper “Unexpected features of the dark proteome” .

Image caption: CSIRO’s 3D visualisation tool, Aquaria , is helping to map the dark proteome using information from the Protein Data Bank.