Transcript:

ambience: synthesized musical interpretation of the protein “Lysozyme”

Imagine a human, a mouse, a monkey and an anteater all making music together. Well, in a way, that’s what we’re hearing right now. I'm Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet. All living things are made of proteins and those proteins, in turn, are composed of amino acids. The amino acids are formed in different repeatable sequences. Mary Anne Clark, a biology professor at Texas Wesleyan University, has assigned different musical notes to represent those amino acid sequences, and yes, the sounds we’re listening to represents the proteins from a spiny anteater, a human, a green monkey, and a mouse.

"One thing is really easy to hear - is you can make the comparison between the protein of two species and hear how similar they are. Because every place they diverge, you'll hear a little chord. And so two proteins that are identical will play all the way through in unison. Two proteins that are very similar will only have a few places where they break out into that chord. And the more distantly related two organisms are, the more different they're particular proteins are going to be. And you can hear that in the music. For example, if I played a human protein and a fish protein, you'd hear a lot more chords than if I were to play a human protein and any other mammal, or another primate. So there's a tight relationship between the same protein in two different species, and the degree of relationship that is thought to exist between those species."

To hear about our new CD, please visit pulseplanet.com. Pulse of the Planet is made possible by the National Science Foundation. I'm Jim Metzner.