Fruit flies, mice, zebra fish, yeast and the tiny worm C. elegans are model organisms that have carried modern biology on their backs.

Scientists did not choose them for their charisma. They were chosen because their similarities illuminate biological principles across many species. Their biology is simple enough for researchers to master yet deep enough to keep delivering new insights centuries later.

But biologists don’t have a common reference point for a vast area of the field: proteins, the cell’s doers. Proteins catalyze chemical reactions, give cells their structure and help them communicate with each other. Most organisms use tens of thousands of protein types, and each can be mutated, modified and measured in different ways and in countless environments. Thanks in part to artificial intelligence, researchers are also generating new proteins faster than they can study them.

Without a shared reference point, study results are hard to compare. Two labs can study the same protein under different experimental conditions and end up with findings that do not line up. The result is a scientific literature full of isolated findings that are sometimes duplicated and difficult to generalize.

As a computational chemist who studies fluorescent........

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