Sounds of DNA and rock music from coronavirus - scientists were able to record all this, and now anyone can listen to it
Music from DNA. How is this possible?
Mark Temple, Medical Molecular Biologist,was researching new drugs to treat cancer: extracting DNA from cells, putting it in small test tubes, and then adding the drug to see how they interact.
Before injecting the drug, he looked throughcombinations of DNA on the screen to see what might be best for the experiment. But this is a long process. So Temple wondered if there was an easier way to find patterns in DNA.
“I realized that I wanted to hear what the data sequence sounds like. The combination of image and sound is a powerful tool for analyzing information,” said Temple.
He created his own system by whichassigned notes to various elements of DNA. The human genome is made up of four different bases, so it was easy to start with four notes, resulting in a little melody based on test tube materials. According to him, this trick really helped to better identify patterns in sequences and more effectively choose which combinations of DNA to use.
Has anyone else turned DNA data into sound?
Yes, Temple is not the first person to do thiscame. Over the past 40 years, researchers have used this trick to identify patterns in DNA, and later began using it for completely different purposes.
Some scientists turn such sounds into songs,which, according to them, can create a therapeutic effect. Others envision a future where sounds can be modified and recycled to create new data.
The first experiments in which scientiststurning biological data into sound began in the early 1980s. In the US, David Diemer, who is now an engineer at the University of California, said he was talking to a friend when he first noticed that three of the four DNA bases correspond to the first letters of musical notes: A, G, and C (do, salt, and "la", respectively).
He started playing notes on the piano and found out thatsome of these combinations actually represent two chords in the musical scale. Later, he gathered a couple of colleagues and composed melodies based on this. The result was a cassette called DNA Suite. It featured a 30-minute recording of music based on the human insulin gene and some bacterial DNA sequences.
Composer Stuart Mitchell founded a startupYour DNA Song, which uses audio processing to turn a person's genetic information into a personalized melody. So the scientific community came to the conclusion that such processing can be used for completely different purposes.
Why make music out of data, how is it useful?
Temple, after his first experiment,created his own algorithmic software that makes sound out of data. The resulting music, he says, can be used to improve scientific research.
“Sometimes we have thousands of pieces of data that are difficult to process somehow. But if you make sound out of it, you can analyze them on a completely different plane,” Temple said.
He spoke about a study in whichscientists have successfully used electrocardiography sound signals to diagnose heart disease: experienced cardiologists could detect abnormalities with 78 percent accuracy after a short training in sonication techniques.
How to make sound out of DNA?
Temple's method is that everyonean individual DNA base, or the four building blocks of the human genome - A, C, T, G - is assigned a note. Then you need to take the next base pair and match it with the remaining set.
Next, Temple takes triplets of bases, which inDNA is responsible for the transformation of amino acids, and also matches them with notes. The result is combinations of notes that can be interpreted as chords. According to him, chords played in succession create music.
Temple later decided to make music out of these sounds.He noted that there is a big difference between what a melody is and just voiced data. Using sound to represent data is an empirical and scientific approach. DNA-based musical "notes" may be melodic to the human ear, but they don't sound like a song that's playing on the radio.
So when he tried to process the RNAcoronavirus, he added a layer of drums and a guitar, and his musician friends overdubbed it with their own music to turn the virus into full-fledged rock music.
So far, there are not many such approaches.followers, but scientists hope that such an unusual approach to data transformation will attract more schoolchildren and young professionals to scientific activities.
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