I'm always bluffed by the imagination of scientists. Microbiologists from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) have converted DNA sequences of human proteins into music, so you can listen to the sound of proteins. One of the researchers, who is both a microbiologist and a skilled pianist, found a way to "cram the 20 standard amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) into just 13 notes." And the generated music got rhythm too... Amazing!
This Gene2Music project has been led by Rie Takahashi and Jeffrey Miller who work at the department of Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics at UCLA. Takahashi is a graduate student in Miller's lab, her professor, but she also plays piano since she was a child. And now, you can play with her.
As an example, below is the beginning of a musical partition which shows the "full length human Thymidylate Synthetase protein translated into music notes according to the chord and rhythm assignments" (Credit: Rie Takahashi)
But how can you reduce the millions of letters of a DNA string into such a small amount of musical notes?
The duo focus on codons -- sets of three adjacent bases that code for particular amino acids. They decided to include four different note durations with codons that appear more frequently transcribed into longer notes than those which appear less often. Individual amino acids are expressed as chords, in which similar amino acids are paired. For example, the amino acids tyrosine and phenylalanine are both assigned a G major chord, but they can be distinguished because the notes in the chord are arranged differently. This means the resulting music has a 20 note range spanning over 2 octaves, but with just 13 base notes.
In "Genes come alive with the sound of music," Nature adds that it's not the first time that researchers have tried "to convert biological structures into music, but Takahashi says it differs from its predecessors because the chord assignment limits the music to within a one-and-a-half octave spread, making it, in her opinion, more pleasing to the ear." And here is what the team did.
More water-loving or hydrophilic amino acids have been assigned a chord in a higher key, while water-hating or hydrophobic ones are lower. So similar amino acids sound alike. And the duration for which a chord is played is determined by the prevelance of its 'codon' (the three DNA letters that make up an amino acid) in the sequence. So amino acids that make up a good chunk of a protein will be played for longer than those that are rare within the protein. This gives the piece a rhythm that says something about the repetitive structure of the protein.
You can listen to several examples of music created by this method. I'm sure you've always liked to listen to horse hemoglobin, don't you?
You can also use the free software of Gene2Music which will translate gene sequences you choose to music via your browser.
For more information, Takahashi and Miller have published their results in Genome Biology under the name "Conversion of amino-acid sequence in proteins to classical music: search for auditory patterns" (Volume 8, Issue 5, Article 405, may 3, 2007). Here is a link to the full text of this paper, from which yu'll get access to several musical files. and here is a link to a slightly different version of this paper from which the above illustration was extracted (Microsoft Word format, 17 pages).
Sources: BioMed Central, via EurekAlert!,May 3, 2007; Daemon Fairless, Nature, May 3, 2007; and various websites
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