Latest revision as of 00:30, 2 November 2017

Music, not just sounds

Since our project pertain to the interdisciplinary field of science-art, to accomplish our goals we needed not only skills in biology and informatic fields, but also in art, music in particular. In order to improve our knowledge on the latter subject, we enrolled as consultant the musician and student of architecture Samuele del Panta, multi-instrumentalist musician and singer. We preferred a student than a professional musician to express the importance of “fresh minds with fresh ideas” and we think iGEM is the perfect frame to test the capabilities of young promising minds.
Samuele worked with us during the may of October to establish a ratio with which our software should translate lights to music and his skills and knowledges in musical composition have been crucial for the development of an efficient system to obtain the final informatic pattern for translation; we are all sure the resulting melody will be a pleasure for everyone’s ears! As a student of architecture, he did not have the slightest idea on how genetical engineering works, so in the beginning we took the right time to explain him what is iGEM and how we were going to produce patterns of fluorescence with bacteria because it was very important to give him a general idea on our project. Afterwards he explained us, in an interesting exchange of knowledge, the basis of musical notes, scales and the common praxis for composition. Therefore we could finally start to think about how to convert light to tones and how to achieve something that can be defined melody, and not just “a bunch of sounds, one next to the other”, as he stated.

The “ear” of an expert

During the Skype conference with Prof. David S. Kong from Boston, we asked him which could be possible applications of our project, from the moment that he has worked recently on science-art. We were curious to know more on his “Biota Beats” and its applications and in response he taught us the important lesson that science art could serve as mean to approach public and try to focus audience attention on the aspects we want to divulge.
Answering to our various questions, he suggested that a possible application of our light-to-sound converter could be the opening of scientific world to blind people; from the moment that usually blind people have an augmented sense of hearing, they could easily detect changes in notes produced converting any kind of fluorescence linked to the expression of a gene or a metabolic pathway. We tried to contact the Blind Association based in Florence and Prato (namely, UICFirenze and UICPrato) but unfortunately we didn’t have enough time to start an initiative with them due to bureaucratic issues and consequent elongation of days required for the approval of the plan.
Nonetheless it is still a valuable advice, the one given us by Prof. Kong and could be explored in the future!

Let coli entertain you!

We had the opportunity to ask students what they would like our “coli music” to sound like and more than 50% of them replied they would like something aimed at reproducing notes in a sort of “random” pattern, or in other words, with the least human contribution possible. Furthermore, we received a similar advice by Prof. Dirk Stemerding, who said that would be much more impressive and surprising to obtain a music that would be the direct expression of bacteria’s metabolism.
Having said that, we thought about how we could make it evident that the translational system is made to interfere the least possible with the pathway expressed by the strains of Escherchia coli and we came up with the idea of programming various experiments in which we changed time after time many variables in the growth medium; for example we used different concentrations of substrates like IPTG to differentiate the expression of a strain from the other, or we used different proportions of the two strains mixed together.
The results were a great number of different patterns of emission that in the end will represent the various sheets “composed” by bacteria!

Skype with Prof. Dirk Stemerding

Skype with Prof. David S. Kong

Team Unifi

unifi.igem@gmail.com