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]