How Novartis scientist turns proteins into melodies

Transcript

So I started composing my own music. And for this I'm using the amino acid sequence of proteins and the nucleotide sequence of DNA and RNA. I am Nora and I work in Technical Research and Development as a group leader. I���m working on proteins, and I play proteins as music. During childhood music was probably the biggest part of my life and I was singing in several choirs and eventually I started to play organ at church at the age of 18. So at the end of high school, I had to make the choice between music and science because I liked both the most during school and I chose science because I thought I can keep music always as a hobby but not vice versa. The amino acid sequence of proteins is often represented as a one letter code. There are 20 natural amino acids and seven out of them are C, D, E, F, G, A, H. So you can play them on a piano as chords or as melodies and I call it protein tunes. Every protein that I look at and every protein sequence that I play on the piano is like a puzzle that wants to get solved and wants to get structured. And then eventually everything comes together and then the melody is there. And then I realized that there is actually a lot of interest in learning more about what I do, about biochemistry, and that music can be the perfect medium to explain it to people who are non-scientists. If you are good at playing music, that's a gift. And as a gift, I think you shouldn't hide it but it should be shared and you should use it to serve other people and make other people happy.