Music inspires proteins and scientists alike

 

Musical macromolecules

This Newscriptster has had a fascination with the proteins piccolo and bassoon since learning about them in high school. These proteins act as scaffolds in neurons, helping to regulate and organize the release of neurotransmitters between cells. They have nothing to do with woodwind instruments. So why give them such musical names?

The same team first documented piccolo and bassoon in 1996 and 1998, respectively, and were thus responsible for the proteins’ musical monikers (Eur. J. Cell Biol. 1996, 69, 214–223; J. Cell Biol. 1998, DOI: 10.1083/jcb.142.2.499).

Eckart Gundelfinger, one of the leaders of those teams and now a professor emeritus at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, tells Newscripts that the names for these instrumentally inclined molecules came from how they interact with other proteins.

“We reasoned that these proteins have to interplay like musical instruments in an orchestra to serve a perfect synaptic harmony,” Gundelfinger says in an email. Piccolo came from a joke from a then-graduate student, Claudia Cases-Langhoff, who was having trouble with the giant protein. Piccolo the protein is 420 kilodaltons, while a piccolo is one of the smallest wind instruments. Bassoon’s name comes from Gundelfinger’s favorite symphony instrument.

Other scientists later followed the same line of thinking. Peri Kurshan, an associate professor of neuroscience at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, says in an email that she and her colleagues named a protein in Caenorhabditis elegans clarinet because it’s similar to bassoon and piccolo.

Other musical proteins include tuba, which is also concentrated in neurons, and bagpipe, which is involved in determining cell fates during fruit fly development.

Symphonic scientists

Scientists don’t indulge their musical proclivities only through their lab work. Many are also musicians. Although rock and rollers like chemistry Nobel laureate Carolyn Bertozzi often get the spotlight, classically inclined musician-scientists are also plentiful. Case in point: the Boston-area biotech hub Kendall Square has its own orchestra.

The Kendall Square Orchestra, stylized as K²O, was founded in 2018 by Elena Spencer and Kelly Clark, who then invited conductor Kristo Kondakçi to join the project. The first concert, in September 2018, featured 14 players in a conference room; by the end of the first season in spring 2019, they were performing in the Boston Symphony Hall, Kondakçi tells Newscripts.

K²O now includes more than 100 members across more than 70 tech companies, most of them located in Kendall Square. Spencer, who is also the CEO of the orchestra, tells Newscripts that most members are trained in the hard sciences, and the bulk of the new people for this season are chemical engineers.

The orchestra is a registered nonprofit and holds a biennial Symphony for Science that benefits local organizations, including Boston Health Care for the Homeless and the Next Step Fund, a charity that supports young people with serious illnesses.

Music “gives permission in a way for things like vulnerability, emotional risk, or shared meaning without getting quantified,” Kondakçi says. “We don’t just treat music as an escape from a job. It’s a beautiful continuation of what science adheres to, just through a different language.”

Spencer says music allows “breakthroughs” to happen outside the laboratory, as it does in what she describes as the process of learning and eventually performing a piece.

“At first, it’s very mechanical, and you’re really caught up in the notes and the mechanics of it. I wouldn’t use the word ‘fun’ for that learning part, because sometimes it’s hard,” Spencer says. But once you surmount that mechanical hurdle, you start to realize that you’re part of something bigger than yourself as you listen to everyone around you, she adds. “You’re not just playing by yourself. You’re part of an organism that’s got its own life.”

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