Researchers from Finland, the UK, and the US believe that their musical technique can provide insight into proteins and how they work. They use sonification to identify the different anomalies and holes in proteins. Now, when I hear sonification all I think about is that awful noise that was produced when we used it to break up the cell walls in one of our previous experiments. How can someone stand to hear that noise all day to try and find anomalies? Well they don't, the frequency and noise that is produced is at a different level and by the researchers account, is quite pleasant. With the use of sonification they can turn the data that they obtain about the proteins, and how they work and fold, into different melodies that can hopefully be used as not only to aid further research but also in the future of teaching about proteins. For now they are sticking to the melodies of proteins to identify irregularities, but they hope to be listening to genomes to further understand the role of junk DNA.
So in the future people can start adding "Protein" and "Genome" to their Spotify playlists.
Journal Reference:
- Robert P. Bywater, Jonathan N. Middleton. Melody discrimination and protein fold classification. Heliyon, 2016; 2 (10): e00175 DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2016.e00175
So the music that they are using isn't exactly what we think of when we think music? I was imagining heavy metal or a symphony. Either way, it's still pretty interesting. I wonder what else thing could lead to.
ReplyDeleteHeavy metal would have been great! ^^^
ReplyDeleteIt is hard to imagine that that interestingly dreadful machine is actually capable of making a pleasant sound, but how amazing is it that there is a protein melody!
I was definitely picturing music, not sonification. This is pretty interesting research and not your average every day stuff. Hopefully a lot more can stem from this
ReplyDeleteI'd like to hear what some of that music sounds like.
ReplyDelete