[accessibleimage] Re: "molecular music" Genes come alive with the sound of music

I get a server error when trying to play a sample.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lisa Yayla" <fnugg@xxxxxxxxx>
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Sent: Tuesday, May 08, 2007 4:25 AM
Subject: [accessibleimage] "molecular music" Genes come alive with the sound 
of music


Hi,
Interesting article from Nature about research done to convert DNA
information to music.
Enclosing excerpt of article and link to research site Gene2Music
"The primary goal of this work is to convert genome-encoded protein
sequences into musical notes in order to hear auditory protein patterns."
Very interesting information there about Art and science and for a bit
of light "molecular music" also can listen to examples at the site.
Regards,Lisa

examples
Gene2Music
http://www.mimg.ucla.edu/faculty/miller_jh/gene2music/home.html
http://www.mimg.ucla.edu/faculty/miller_jh/gene2music/examples.html
Art and Science
http://www.mimg.ucla.edu/faculty/miller_jh/gene2music/artscience.html
Nature
http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070430/full/070430-7.html
excerpt
Genes come alive with the sound of music
Molecular geneticists riff with strings of protein-coding DNA.

Check out the Gene2Music site to play your favourite protein.

Punchstock

Imagine humming along to horse haemoglobin or tapping your toes to
transcription factors. Now you can, thanks to a pair of molecular
biologists who have developed a way to turn such proteins into music.

Rie Takahashi, a graduate student in molecular genetics who has studied
the piano since she was a child, developed the method as part of an
undergraduate project for her supervisor, Jeffrey Miller. She says they
were inspired, in part, by a blind meteorology graduate student at
Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who developed a way of reading
weather maps by converting the different colour gradations of a map into
a range of tones.

They wondered whether something similar could help both the sighted and
the visually impaired to visualize proteins, which are made up of amino
acids coded for by 'letters' of DNA in a gene. "We wanted to be able to
move away from a two-dimensional string of letters across a sheet of
paper, and to see if adding another dimension — sound — would help,"
says Takahashi.

So Takahashi and Miller, who are based at the University of California,
Los Angeles, developed a way of converting each of the 20 standard amino
acids from which proteins are built into different piano chords. When
played, the amino acids form a slightly disharmonious, but not
altogether unpleasant tune, they report in Genome Biology1.

The project, called Gene2Music, isn't the first to convert biological
structures into music2,3, 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.

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.

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