Dark Bridges

Despite decades of progress, thousands of the body’s proteins remain largely unexplored, forming what scientists call the ‘dark proteome’. Information lurking in the depths of this darkness could shed light on human health and disease. A team turned to an AI tool that predicts protein structures to identify poorly-understood proteins with shapes resembling important signalling proteins called GPCRs. The researchers then examined the role of one such protein, TM184C, and found it regulates internal recycling (autophagy) and promotes the building of bridges between cells, through which messages and material can be exchanged (pictured, bridging between human kidney-derived cells grown in the lab). Such intercellular bridges play important roles in communication, including between tumour cells. Identifying one of the molecular builders could eventually offer ways to interfere with these connections in diseases such as cancer, and the work illustrates the potential of structure-based protein discovery to illuminate hidden secrets of the proteome.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Kyutae D. Lee, Samuel Taylor and Jennifer Arcuri, and colleagues
• Department of Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, Miami, FL, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
• Published in Nature, September 2026