Business of Life

The Sound of Your Cells

Your body has about 10 trillion cells, each of them busy growing, reproducing and dying. Just how each of them know what they are supposed to do is an awesome mystery to me.
Now I was never very good at high school science so I accept what scientists say about How Cells Work.

"At the most basic level, a cell is really a little bag full of chemical reactions that are made possible by enzymes. Enzymes are made from amino acids, and they are proteins. When an enzyme is formed, it is made by stringing together between 100 and 1,000 amino acids in a very specific and unique order. The chain of amino acids then folds into a unique shape. That shape allows the enzyme to carry out specific chemical reactions -- an enzyme acts as a very efficient catalyst for a specific chemical reaction. The enzyme speeds that reaction up tremendously."

As I said it's a awesome mystery to me. But I can accept easily the idea that cells make sounds since I've listened to Molecular Music.

Dr. Linda Long is an award winning biochemist and musician who has translated the three dimensional positions of a protein's amino acids into note sequences. This sonic way of describing protein structures is another way of perceiving and recognizing patterns in very complex structures. On her site, you can hear MP-3s of medicinal plants like pokeweed, mustard and and parsley in a collection called "Music of the Plants" or you can listen to MP-3 clips of note sequences derived from protein hormones in "Music of the Body" and hear the calcium chimes or the voice of metabolism. What I can't describe is how wondrously lovely and soothing the music is. It's unlike anything you've ever heard, yet it's still very appealing. She is now marketing CDs of her music.

For her work, Dr. Long has been awarded an Invention and Innovation award by NESTA, the UK's National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts. She says,

It’s about viewing science from a different perspective, so that people who may not be able to look at scientific data in an analytical way can still connect with it and get something from it.

Because I can easily grasp the idea of the cells of the body working together in a wondrous symphony, I can understand this story in the New York Times, Listening for Cancer by Clive Thompson.

Three years ago, the nanotechnology expert James Gimzewski realized something startling about human cells: since they have many tiny moving parts, they might be producing tiny vibrations. And since all vibrations produce noise, it would be theoretically possible to listen to the sound of a cell. Gimzewski set about adapting an extremely small device to measure these vibrations and then with another device proceeded to amplify them loud enough for human ears. He discovered that a yeast cell produced about 1,000 vibrations a second. When he amplified the signal, a musical hum filled the room. ''It wasn't at all what I expected,'' he recalls. ''It sounded beautiful.''

Beautiful, and also potentially revolutionary. Gimzewski says that his technique could become a unique tool in the war against cancer: to figure out if a cell is malignant, doctors could simply listen to it.

When a cell turns cancerous, its internal machinery alters: it might divide more rapidly, and its walls could take a new shape. Those changes, Gimzewski surmises, would produce distinctive rates of vibration and thus distinctive noises. He has already measured the acoustics of some cells going through death cycles. When he measured an inert yeast cell, its lack of movement produced a dead-sounding hiss. And when he immersed a bunch of yeast in alcohol, the cells emitted a creepy ''screaming'' sound as they suddenly perished. Even minute changes -- like getting warmer -- make the cells sing differently. Gimzewski calls his technique sonocytology, and in August he published the first paper on this field in the journal Science.

Posted by Jill Fallon at December 15, 2004 12:50 PM | Permalink