The viral dark matter is all the sequences that we find in metagenomes that we don’t know what to do with. In a project funded by the National Science Foundation, together with Dr. Forest Rohwer and Dr. Anca Segall in the SDSU Biology Department, and Dr. Alex Burgin, we will tackle some of this dark matter. We’re going to combine metagenomics, metaproteomics, metabolomics, and structural biology to unearth the functions of sets of genes that we have no idea what they do.