From Symphony to Structure: Listening to Proteins Fold

Rohini Subrahmanyam in The Scientist:

When a protein folds, its string of amino acids wiggles and jiggles through countless conformations before it forms a fully folded, functional protein. This rapid and complex process is hard to visualize.

Now, Martin Gruebele, a chemist at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, and his team have found a way to use sound along with sight to better understand protein folding. He teamed up with composer and software developer Carla Scaletti, the cofounder of Symbolic Sound Corporation, to convert simulated protein folding data into a series of sounds with different pitches. The scientists identified patterns in the sounds and inferred how the bonds between the amino acids played a major role in orchestrating the folding process. The results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, will help scientists unravel the mysteries behind protein folding.1 

“Vision is one of the most obvious and direct ways to process input, but when you think about it, you use your ears a lot for clues from the environment to get around. You aren’t even often aware of how you use sounds to navigate along with vision,” said Gruebele.

More here.

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