LEILA FADEL, HOST:
This is the sound of the coronavirus.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FADEL: COVID's genetic code has been fed into a computer and interpreted as music.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
The person behind this is Mark Temple, a microbiologist in Sydney, Australia.
MARK TEMPLE: I'm both a musician and a scientist. So I thought, I'm well-placed here to actually approach this from a different angle. No one's really done this.
MARTÍNEZ: He developed a computer algorithm that assigns musical notes to DNA sequences. And he says it could help save lives.
TEMPLE: I heard about this thing called sonification. It's a way of using audio to analyze or to represent data. So I thought, well, could I get some DNA data and make audio from that?
FADEL: Generally, computers display DNA as lines and lines of letters.
TEMPLE: Each letter represents a module in the DNA sequence.
FADEL: But there are hundreds of thousands of letters in a sequence.
TEMPLE: It's like trying to read a book that has no punctuation.
MARTÍNEZ: So Dr. Temple created a way to listen to the DNA while the letters scroll across the screen.
TEMPLE: Down at the bottom here is a DNA sequence. So let me just play this and you'll see what I mean.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
TEMPLE: So what you just heard then, those other little blips - like, I'll play one.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
TEMPLE: Like that one, blip. It's a stop codon, a little bit of sequence that's important to the cell. So because it's important, I put a blip on it.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FADEL: Temple has updated DNA sonification, which has been around for about 40 years. This music you're hearing now is based on the DNA of insulin.
MARTÍNEZ: Which was turned into an album and released in the '90s for entertainment. Temple says music and science have a lot to offer each other.
(SOUNDBITE OF DR DAVID DREAMER AND RILEY MCLAUGHLIN'S "INSULIN A & B CHAINS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
