Music for
me is something that plays a huge role in my life. I’m always listening,
playing, or singing some kind of music. So when I saw this new study it
definitely peaked my interest. Structures of proteins can now be studied in a
completely new and different way, by listening to music. This technique is
theorized to more easily help scientists identify anomalies in proteins.
By using a
process called sonification, the data about the proteins can be turned into musical
sounds and melodies. This approach is being used to ask three questions: what
can protein data sound like? Are there any analytical benefits to this? In this
data can specific elements or anomalies be heard? This technique can be used to
help recognize fold structures of proteins by each protein sequence having a
melodic shape. The amino acid sequences correlate to musical notes, with their
properties being reflected by sound qualities.
38 people
were selected for the test to decide how well the sonification of the three
proteins; 1ny9, 1r75, and 1div.pdb, were perceived in relation to data
sources. From the 38 people, most of them were students, with 21 of them having
more than one year of musical training, 17 having up to or more than one year
of protein study, and 10 with no training in either. The subjects were giving
four answer choices to choose from in their comparison of the sonifications to
visual components: A) similar, B) not similar, C) sometimes similar, D) mostly
similar. There were a total of six experiments, with the first two used to
establish both positive (similar) and negative (not similar) controls. The
results from the experiments showed that a good majority of the subjects were
able to discern the correlations between the data related images and sounds. The
study is hoping to expand to a more complete fold identification system to
identify 3D folds of different proteins. Sonification is also being done on DNA
sequences and gene expressions.
Reference:
http://www.heliyon.com/article/e00175
We did our blog on the same topic! lol! But I found this topic really interesting, which is why I wrote about it, but I am really intrigued and I actually would really like to listen to the melodies that these proteins produce!
ReplyDeleteMusic impacts society every day. It's so interesting that music created by sonification can be used to provide information about protein structures that could not be determined from other means. The potential for sonifications to detect genetic disease markers puts a whole new meaning to the phrase "music can heal you".
ReplyDeleteYou can listen here.
ReplyDelete