Protein sequences give researchers clues to their functions in the body. The sequence space of proteins is astronomically large, so identifying viable sequences is a hard problem,” Morcos said. “The closer proteins are to each other in this virtual landscape, the more similar they are in function,” he said. These sequences might become real proteins,” Morcos said. “The majority of protein sequences that exist don’t yet have an annotation — a label indicating a function or location,” he said.