Music Made From Genetic Patterns

Tracy Staedter, Discovery News

Even if you've never picked up an instrument, music is in your blood. Scientists have discovered a way to convert the DNA patterns that code for proteins into rhythmic piano notes that sound pleasant to a musician's ear.

The conversion method could not only make the otherwise daunting field of genomic coding more approachable to the general public and even children but could also provide scientists — including those who are vision-impaired — an entirely new way for analyzing proteins.

"It's a great teaching tool because everyone is familiar with music and it's a universal language," said research assistant Rie Takahashi, a microbiologist who studied classic piano for 14 years.

Takahashi developed the Gene2Music technique with microbiologist Jeffrey Miller at the University of California, Los Angeles, and published their results in the latest issue of Genome Biology 2007.

The team's initial study focused on the human thymidylate synthase A (ThyA), a protein involved in making and repairing DNA. Knowing the genetic pattern of a protein's amino acids (there are 20) is essential to understanding its function.

For example, some proteins have a pattern that causes them to repel water, while others attract water. That information that can ultimately help bioengineers develop more effective drugs.

It was too much to assign each of the 20 amino acids a unique note (the range would be two-and-a-half octaves), so Takahashi paired amino acids together into chords according to their water attracting or repelling capabilities. The result was 13 base notes, with the higher chords represented by the water-attracters and the lower keys represented by the water repellers.

Rhythm is determined by the three DNA letters that code for each amino acid in the protein. The more abundant the sequence of the three letters, the longer the duration a chord is played. So in the end, the chords and the rhythm say something about the protein's structure.

"Previous efforts have sought either to create works of art, and were directed primarily to the artistic community, or tried to evoke in the listener a sense of the 'music of the spheres' inherent in DNA," said Neil Smalheiser, assistant professor in psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

"In contrast, the Gene2Music project shares the sensibility and mindset of the bioinformatics community, which seeks to create public, open source tools for discerning biologically meaningful patterns within protein and DNA sequences."

But there are many different ways of assigning amino acids to notes and rhythm, said Smalheiser, and the software is still at the demo stage.

"Right now their software converts arbitrary nucleotide sequences to amino acid sequences, and thus to music, regardless of whether the result is biologically accurate or not," he said.

Takahashi and Miller are working to improve upon the software so that different instruments could be assigned to unique sections of the genome as way to distinguish their function. Free software developed by team member Frank Pettit can be downloaded from the Gene2Music Web site: (http://www.mimg.ucla.edu/faculty/miller_jh/gene2music/home.html).