SONGE (SONification of GEnes): A project exploring the
use of auditory display to find patterns in DNA sequences.
DNA sequences are a cool molecules in
your cells that make you look the way you do. Patterns in DNA sequences, which
can be thought of as strings of A's, C's, G's and T's, tell us much about
biolgical function and can indicate the presence of genetic disease. For
example, Huntington's disease is caused by an excess number of copies of a
particular repeating pattern. Frequently, patterns of interest are too noisy
or complex to be easily detected by eye. The purpose of the SONGE project is
to detect patterns in DNA by encoding and mapping DNA sequences to parameters
of non-speech sound (sonification) and attempting to identify the patterns by
ear. The challenge is to find mappings from sequence to sound that will make
patterns easy to hear. The project will involve a literature search,
developing software tools for DNA sonification, and running experiments to
determine the effectiveness of different mappings.
This is a joint project with
Dannie Durand and Perry Cook
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