A Musical Score for Disease

July 18, 2008 | Source: Technology Review

Gil Alterovitz, a research fellow at Harvard Medical School, is developing a computer program that translates protein and gene expression into music.

In his acoustic translation, harmony represents good health, and discord indicates disease.

Using data collected from a study of protein expression in colon cancer, Alterovitz analyzed more than three thousand related proteins involved in the disease. He found four key networks, using various genetic databases that catalog relationships between genes and proteins. He then assigned a note to each network, and together, these notes formed a harmonic chord. He compared the “music” of normal, healthy human data sets to that of the colon-cancer samples and found that, according to his model, colon cancer sounded “inharmonious.”