{credit}Mark Temple{/credit}

With an alphabet comprising just four letters, DNA sequence isn’t much to look at. So, when sequence analysis tools want to highlight key elements, they typically do so using colour, font, or by overlaying other types of information. In the not-too-distant future, there may be another option: Audio.

In a paper published this past April in BMC Bioinformatics, molecular biologist and part-time drummer Mark Temple of Western Sydney University, Australia, describes “an auditory display tool” for DNA: sequence in, audio out.

Available online at dnasonification.org, the tool does precisely what it sounds like: Given a sequence of DNA, it will convert the As, Cs, Gs, and Ts into notes played by a virtual piano, guitar, and organ. An ancillary browser extension, called Jazz-Plugin, is required to play the resulting MIDI files, though Temple has made a number of example MP3 files available on his web site and on YouTube.

After uploading a sequence, the user can select precisely how the musical transcription is accomplished. The simplest mode maps each base to a single note, providing a four-tone auditory landscape. Another maps dinucleotides to notes, increasing the complexity to 16 total sounds.

Most informative, says Temple, is the trinucleotide mode. Here, the software maps each nucleotide triplet to one of 20 notes, and outputs the audio in each of three reading frames at once, just as the genetic code maps 64 codons to 20 amino acids. The result is a series of three-note arpeggios – CGF-ADD-CFF-DFG-AFC-GCD-FCD-FCD, for instance. Optional parameters allow the user to flag start and stop codons, or to cause audio in each reading frame to turn on and off as start and stop codons arise. Continue reading →