Friday, May 25, 2007

Listen to your genes

To try and make science more interesting for the general public, researchers from the Department of Microbiology at the University of California have developed a program that converts DNA sequence into music. The results of their pilot project are presented here. More than just a curiosity, this may also help blind or otherwise impaired people interpret sequence data.

The group also links to their own website where you can translate your own gene of interest (goi) into music. The gene sequence needs to be in FASTA format, so it should look something like this:

>name-of-your-goi
ATGACGTGCAT......

Spaces are allowed, letters can be in uppercase or lowercase, a maximum of 4000 letters can be processed. The file will open right away and play for you, and it will be sent to the e-mail address you provide. Very cute. I just tried my own favorite goi, and it sounds great. I can't seem to figure out a way to post my music here. HT to VWXYNot?

UPDATE: Found a way to put the music to my goi online. Ha! Google has free webpages. I created one for myself, so I can link to stuff there. So here it is.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for my very first link! I'm barely tech-savvy enough to publish my own blog, so I'm afraid I don't know how to link music files either. What is your GOI?

Anonymous said...

of course, you still have web server space here. but it appears you let your domain name expire.

Anonymous said...

Linking to me just earned you a tag! Sorry 'bout that. It's actually quite fun.