Scientists hope to illuminate unknown human proteins with new public database

A new, publicly available database has been created that contains the thousands of proteins encoded by genes in the human genome whose function remains a mystery. Dubbed the ‘Unknome’ database, the goal of this repository is to promote more rapid exploration of understudied proteins. It assigns a ‘knownness’ score to each of these proteins and ranks them based on factors such as function, conservation across species and subcellular compartmentalisation.

Developed by the University of Oxford’s Matthew Freeman and Sean Munro at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge and colleagues, Unknome contains all protein clusters that contain at least one protein from humans or any of 11 model organisms.