Scientists write musical notation on virus protein

NEWDELHI: In times of social isolation, many are turning to the soothing notes of classical music, but for scientists, it might provide a new method to study the virus that has brought the world to its knees.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have translated the spike protein of Sars-Cov-2, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, into music using a technique called sonification.

The audio, posted on SoundCloud in March, is meant to help researchers better understand the structure of the virus, which first emerged in China late last year and has infected more than a million people across the world in just over three months. Over time, this audio format could help create drugs or find an antibody that can counter the virus’s effect, scientists say. At the heart of the experiment is the spike protein -- the component on the surface of the virus that gives it a crown-like appearance and the name coronavirus (‘corona’ meaning ‘crown’ in Latin). This protein is what binds the pathogen to host cells, often predominantly in the lungs. Its structure and relationship with the cell it infects is instrumental in understanding how the virus attacks the human body.

But why choose music over conventional methods of mapping the virus? “Our brains are great at processing sound. We would need a high-powered microscope to see the equivalent detail in an image, and we could never see it all at once. Sound is such an elegant way to access the information stored in a protein,” Markus J Buehler, the MIT professor at the helm of the project, said.