Skip to Content
Uncategorized

Making Music out of Genes

A UCLA graduate student creates melodies out of genetic and protein sequences, allowing us to “listen” to DNA.

Listen to this.

It’s the music created by the human protein thymidylate synthase A (ThyA). Really. At least, it’s the notes created to “play” the music of this string of amino acids, with each amino acid assigned a chord.

Rie Takahashi, a graduate student at UCLA, dreamed up the idea of making music out of proteins when she read about a blind meteorology student at Cornell who converted the colors of a contoured weather map into tones corresponding to different hues.

Takahashi hopes her creation will help disabled geneticists “read” sequences using sound, she writes in a report in Genome Biology. “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,” Takahashi told Nature.com.

Helping blind biologists “hear” DNA is laudable, but I’m also finding the notion of amino acids as chords strung together to be something eerie and wonderful, like putting my ear to a seashell and hearing the ocean. In addition, the idea makes sense, given that music is essentially digital–a series of precise calibrations of sound that the ancient Greeks thought of as a form of mathematics. For instance, the ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras developed “The Music of the Spheres” to describe the proportional movements of the planets, moon, and sun in what he believed to be whole-number ratios identical to musical intervals.

Checking out Takahashi’s Gene2Music website, I discover that other musically inclined scientists have applied notes and sounds to biological activities, such as the functions of a cell. You really need to check out these strange, compelling tunes.

Takahashi’s website also allows you to enter any amino-acid sequence and have it translated into music. Try it, and listen to the slightly dissonant but curiously soothing sounds of protein sequences that are in a sense singing.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Geoffrey Hinton tells us why he’s now scared of the tech he helped build

“I have suddenly switched my views on whether these things are going to be more intelligent than us.”

ChatGPT is going to change education, not destroy it

The narrative around cheating students doesn’t tell the whole story. Meet the teachers who think generative AI could actually make learning better.

Meet the people who use Notion to plan their whole lives

The workplace tool’s appeal extends far beyond organizing work projects. Many users find it’s just as useful for managing their free time.

Learning to code isn’t enough

Historically, learn-to-code efforts have provided opportunities for the few, but new efforts are aiming to be inclusive.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.