Shasha Chong. Credit: Caltech
“The way genes are regulated—how they are dialed up or turned down—is the basis underlying complexity and cellular function. Much of this process is mediated by proteins that do not have clear shapes. These proteins are so difficult to understand because they don’t fold into well-defined structures, and cannot be understood by conventional analytic methods. The ‘dark proteome’ is another name for these structures. They can be thought of as the dark matter of biology because they make up a large portion of our bodies’ proteins and play many roles in our bodies, but we know very little about them.” —Shasha Chong, who recently joined Caltech as assistant professor of chemistry and is a Ronald and JoAnne Willens Scholar