Why Do Cells Eat Themselves?
As you are reading my post now, your cells are busy making sure they stay healthy, and autophagy is one of the essential contributing processes. During autophagy a cell recycles unused, superfluous, and harmful material into something more useful. Interestingly, this process can be boosted in response to stress such as when nutrient levels are low. This helps the cell generate nutrients from its own materials and stay alive! Due to its intricate role in maintaining cellular health, autophagy malfunction has been implicated in several diseases such as cancer, which highlights the importance of understanding this process.
Are you listening to your data?
While most scientists usually only look at their data, we decided to also listen to ours. We did this through sonification, which is a method used to turn data into audible sound. Just as data can be visualized in graphs or images, it can also be sonified using various music technological methods. This allows for using the high temporal capacity of the human ear to explore the data in ways that are slow to scan visually.
The pilot study was based on sonification of hourly snapshots of Drosophila cells during starvation - where autophagy is turned on - and during refeeding - where autophagy is turned off. Two sonification approaches were tested: audification and parametric sonification. Both methods were based on encoding the image sequences into motiongrams and videograms: images that summarize the average row- or column-wise time series. As you listen to the sonification sound files you will notice the difference between the sound produced by starving cells and fed cells although buried with some noise. For me fed cells sounded calmer with a more consistent sound while starving cells were much louder!
The project was published on RITMO Centre webpage and you can both read more about it and listen to the generated sonification files of fed and starved cells here.
A Pilot Project and Beyond..
This pilot project employed a multidisciplinary approach, blending expertise from musicology, biology, and computational analysis to explore a cell recycling system through the lens of music. By combining these diverse fields, we aimed to gain novel insights into autophagy. The prototype generated by this project can be further optimized to deepen our understanding of cellular autophagy and unravel novel features that are otherwise hard to discover by common approaches.
One immediate further exploration will be through the UiO:Life Science convergence environment AUTORHYTHM, where data sonification will be one of the work packages to discover spatiotemporal autophagy patterns and will hopefully inspire further exploration at the intersection of music, science, and health.
This project was announced as a winner of Digital Life Norway’s RRI-inspired transdisciplinary side quest call in 2022, read more here. It is part of my postdoc project led by Helene Knævelsrud and in collaboration with Professor Alexander Refsum Jensenius and the music technologist Bálint Laczko at the RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time, and Motion.
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