Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Music from DNA and Protein Sequences

Music from DNA and Protein Sequences.

The code of life is based on four chemical residues abbreviated as A, T, G, and C. They appear in a long spaghetti string of a molecule know as DNA. Proteins which are the cinder blocks of life have 20 residues that students of biochemistry are required to memorize as a rite of passage. Surprisingly, when these residues are rendered to musical notes, we don't hear random noise as one might expect but a melody. The algorithms in which the authors used to create music from DNA and protein sequences is described in Link 3.

Link 1 Link 2 Link 3 Link 4

from Link 2:

  • Prof. Susumu Ohno (of Beckman Research Institute of the City of Hope, who died on January 13, 2000, at the age of 71) proposed years ago that the repetition process governs both the musical composition and the DNA sequence construction . see this paper by Ohno in Immunogenetics (1986) titled: "The all pervasive principle of repetitious recurrence governs not only coding sequence construction but also human endeavor in musical composition".

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