If a virus could sing

[Music]

i’ll give you a gift today of

the sound of proteins as some of you

might know

most living matter is built from

proteins like the cells in our skin

hair eyes and also viruses proteins are

really the

materials of choice by nature to build

life and

these proteins are encoded by what we

call dna

which is then translated into amino

acids which then assemble or fold into

complex structures such as the virus

but we are hearing about the corona

virus that virus is also made from

proteins

um in fact protein in the in the top

center um

shows a part of that corvette 19 virus

spike protein that actually

leads to the infection of humans and

what you see this uh

picture here is a part of the genetic

sequence of the pathogen of covert 19

and

there are about 30 000 letters of dna in

the virus

but we know very little about what these

letters mean what kind of proteins are

formed how the virus is actually built

and what the function is of these

individual components of the machinery

of the virus

in fact in general scientists you know

very little about what type of proteins

form from specific codes of dna and

without understanding the language of

dna

the language of proteins it’s very

difficult to develop treatments or

vaccines and

so we have been thinking about ways to

find other

mechanisms to access the information

stored in dna stored in proteins

specifically to have a direct connection

of the information to our brains

so what we have been doing we’ve been

studying chemistry for many many

decades as humanity and we’re finding

out that chemistry the way we

conventionally understand it really is

wrong

molecules don’t look like the pictures

on the right hand side even though most

chemistry textbooks when you open and

that’s what you find

in them chemistry um really really

behaves more like what’s seen on the

left molecules are continuously moving

and vibrating and these

vibrations these movements are because

at the scale of atoms and molecules

everything follows the laws of quantum

chemistry which really

means that everything is waves and

vibrations so these pictures of waves

and vibrations

is something that we can actually

relate with when we think about

vibrations of strength for instance in

fact we can actually

make these molecular vibrations audible

just like we just heard

uh somebody strumming on guitar and we

can similarly make

vibrations in a protein in a molecule

audible and this translation of

structure to sound allows us to hear

molecules which enables a direct

connection to our brains

we can hear slight differences such as

mutations or structural changes

like when the virus the protein and

virus binds to the proteins in the human

cell we could hear that we can actually

understand that process

through sound and the reason why we’re

doing this is because our brains are

very effective in processing information

or structure through sound

and in just a few seconds we can

recognize even very subtle changes of a

structure of a molecule of genetic

information

so what you hear here is the sound of a

larger protein molecule so this is sort

of the equivalent of a guitar but now

you hear a protein and

what you hear is the musical

representation of the proteins

complex hierarchical structure across

scales again it begins from the scale of

dna

to the amino acids to the proteins to

the assembly of protein or larger

structure and so the question is

how is the sound generated and the the

amazing thing is

that each building block of amino are

proteins are called

amino acids so what you hear now um

sounds like an alarm bell but actually

these are the fundamental building

blocks or sounds from the amino acids

which are the structures encoded by dna

and what we can do is we can use these

building blocks and design and create a

structural representation

in audible space of a larger protein and

these sort of audible fingerprints that

we have now of these 20 amino acids off

the genetic information

are all the chemical lego bricks nature

is like

lego it builds light out of these 20

amino acids to make create complicated

structures and

in a more complicated representation of

a larger protein of course you don’t

just have the individual ladders of

information we have information also

about

the structure whether a sequence is

forming a loop or a helix

and you can imagine this being like a

guitar solo playing over a drum and a

bass player you have multiple levels of

information and

this is what you just heard on the on

the previous slide now recently we

focused our attention

on the on some of the proteins found in

the pathogen of cobit 19 and

we’ve particularly looked at the spike

protein you’ve already seen an image a

few minutes ago

these are little crowns sticking out of

the virus these are very important

proteins in this in this virus because

these are the proteins that actually

cause the infection they attach to the

human cell

and with music with a musical

representation of this protein

we can immediately capture within just a

few minutes seconds

um many many different relevant features

of this complex biological structure and

connected with our

brains we have another way of

understanding this this particular

protein and

i’m going to show you now you can listen

now how this sounds like

um this is a translation now of this

protein structure this

sound to render a musical representation

of the virus spike protein

[Music]

what you see on there on the picture is

actually the spike protein now a little

more deep

view that you can recognize from the

image already this is a very complex

structure it’s a very large protein and

the music the entire composition the

entire piece is about one hour

and 50 minutes long and i’ll be uh

sharing a link with you to soundcloud

where you can listen to the entire piece

and enjoy that and really have another

way of understanding the virus and all

the impacts it has

in this particular way of creating the

music we used classical instruments to

have lack of structure in music we have

assigned a unique note to each amino

acid which is

encoded by the dna i’ve also quoted

structural details

in note length spacing and overlaying

melodies and

if you if you study the music you’ll

recognize it’s actually very complex it

has

dozens and dozens of layers of sound

many many millions of notes

that represent the structure and it also

features a concept called counterpoint

which is a very important compositional

method used um as one of the first

composers using was john sebastian

hundreds of years ago and we’ve

discovered that these counterpoint

compositional techniques are also found

in the creation of proteins and

what we have found is that protein music

is actually counterpoint music so

but one of the questions we’re exploring

right now is has perhaps already

discovered

some of the underlying structural design

principles in the materials that build

up our brain our body our cells and

viruses and we’re hoping to find out

what the connections are another really

exciting opportunity is

because we have a way of mapping amino

acids in the material to sound we can

hear materials now

we can also go the other way around we

can actually make materials out of scent

because we have a unique mapping we can

listen to sound and assign what amino

acids what genetic information

made up that sound and we can then build

materials from that and

we have been using this um to think

about ways to maybe using sound as a

material

method to create maybe drugs that are

certain diseases

and maybe use compositional methods of

creating new music to develop antibodies

for instance

and another way we have been using this

is to use computers and we’ve all heard

about ai

which is i think one of the most

exciting technologies emerging in these

last several years and decades ai is

very powerful what we have done we have

used the composition the create the

proteins found

hundreds of different coronaviruses that

exist in nature

and trained in ai let the eye listen to

all these different sounds of all these

many different species of coronaries

and let it generate new music that

represents the kinds of proteins that

nature has not yet invented and perhaps

we can use this

to identify antibodies from the melody

structures found in this

in this structure

so what you hear here is the sound of a

new protein

generated by an ai um so this is a

music that we have translated back into

an actual protein which is a result of

the ai listening to a very large number

of different coronavirus

species and one of the things we’re

exploring right now is well

this music these proteins that we can

derive from the music

might actually hold the secret or key to

an antibody potentially

more recently we’re also focusing on a

couple other directions we are

developing a musical model

of the virus itself but also the

attachment of the virus to the human

cell especially the

interaction of the virus with the human

cell receptor ece2

and piano compositions and musical

reflection of infection that’s the

moment during which the virus

interacts with the cell so for

microscope into the details of the

molecular motion that are happening

as the virus infects our bodies through

music we’ve learned to speak the

language of life

these proteins are really the building

blocks of life and music can be a way of

accessing this information

and we hope this might revolutionize our

ability to understand life treat

diseases

and potentially develop new medical

technologies and biomaterials

and as as you can see from these

thoughts

music is everywhere matter is sound we

can make

viruses and materials into sound but

also sound is matter we can use sound

to create real material from it thank

you very much for your attention

[Music]

[Applause]