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DNA-rainbow, A New Vision of Human Chromosomes

Posted by samzenpus on Thu Feb 08, 2007 04:21 AM
from the painting-genes dept.
Biotech Science
An anonymous reader writes "Two scientists have rendered amazing pictures using datafiles from the human genome project. They assigned different colors to the DNA and rendered images showing interesting patterns and strange structures of our chromosomes. It might be a groundbreaking new idea for displaying and maybe better understanding our genes. With its fascinating pictures it is a beautiful mix of science and art."
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[+] DNA-Radio, Tune In To Your Chromosomes 77 comments
An anonymous reader writes "The folks behind the DNA-Rainbow project (discussed on Slashdot before) apparently have some time to play around with genome data. After creating amazing pictures from the human DNA code they are now transforming all chromosomes to audio and streaming them to the Internet. Every base is read and broadcasted instead converting it to a color. Seemingly this artistic project will last a while. After some math they found out that it will take them more than 23.5 years to air the whole human genome sequence."
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  • Magic Eye? (Score:5, Funny)

    by SinVulture (825310) on Thursday February 08 2007, @04:26AM (#17931870) Homepage
    No matter how hard I try, I can't see the sailboat!

    • Re:Magic Eye? (Score:5, Informative)

      by advocate_one (662832) on Thursday February 08 2007, @05:15AM (#17932068)
      for the bemused... here's the reference... [imdb.com]

      Little Girl: [looking at a Magic Eye poster] Wow. It's a schooner.
      Willam Black: Ha ha ha ha. You dumb bastard. It's not a schooner... it's a Sailboat.
      Little Boy: A schooner IS a sailboat stupid head.
      Willam Black: [becoming enraged] You know what. There is NO Easter Bunny. Over there, that's just a guy in a suit.

  • Lame (Score:4, Informative)

    by nacturation (646836) <.nacturation. .at. .gmail.com.> on Thursday February 08 2007, @04:27AM (#17931880) Journal
    This is the same principle as the Bible Code which has been shown [anu.edu.au] over and over to be rubbish. If you line things up in various ways you can find just about any pattern you want given sufficiently long input.
     
    • It doesn't matter what the pattern is, nor what it means. If the pattern is there, then the pattern is there. What does matter is what you DO with the pattern, and maybe why it is there.

      Any pattern can be modeled in an algorithm, and from this algorithm it can be extrapolated. A set of data without any patterns is noise; random data. An algorithm found in a dataset speaks of a function, and understanding functions in the human genome leads to better understanding of what we truly are.

      • Re:A pattern is a patterns is a pattern (Score:5, Insightful)

        by sporkme (983186) * on Thursday February 08 2007, @06:34AM (#17932342) Homepage
        Referencing the earlier mentioned movie, Pi:
        Sol Robeson:

        Hold on. You have to slow down. You're losing it. You have to take a breath. Listen to yourself. You're connecting a computer bug I had with a computer bug you might have had and some religious hogwash. You want to find the number 216 in the world, you will be able to find it everywhere. 216 steps from a mere street corner to your front door. 216 seconds you spend riding on the elevator. When your mind becomes obsessed with anything, you will filter everything else out and find that thing everywhere.
        Just that a pattern exists does not give meaning to the pattern. The Golden Rectangle [wikipedia.org] was applied to the human body by Da Vinci and others, but no great significance can be discerned except that vertebrates tend to be symmetrical. The heavens did not burst forth as our creator revealed himself. The DNA pattern is more of the same - searching for patterns tends to yield them eventually.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by radtea (464814)
        An algorithm found in a dataset speaks of a function, and understanding functions in the human genome leads to better understanding of what we truly are.

        An algorithm found in a dataset speaks of imperfect compression.

        As to "what we TRULY are", we are everything that we are, neither more nor less, in all our messy complexity. Reductionism generates epistemological convenience, not metaphysical revelation. Although Platonists in reductionist clothing have been overstating their case for centuries.

    • Re:Lame (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 08 2007, @07:30AM (#17932534)
      Well, no, it isn't.

      The Bible Code people claimed that their ability to find patterns in a particular text of a particular religion both validated the truth of that religion and also allowed predictive ability on world events.

      These guys are saying, "Hey look, if you display a bitmap representation of genomes, they look pretty."

      I am sure that you can see the difference between these two claims.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Angst Badger (8636)
        Well, it's a bit more than that. It's plainly structured data, and that's what's interesting. If you plot random data in a graphic, it looks very different than if you load a program or a structured datafile into video RAM. These plots, or at least parts of them, look very much like programs. Now, I wouldn't read anything more into it than that it is indeed structured, any more than I could distinguish between a graphical representation of a word processor versus a billing package, but it is definitely not,
      • Amusing aside:

        Using the Bible Code method, you can find a 'prediction' of the death of Princess Diana in the book 'Moby Dick'

        Also, Genesis contains the phrase "Darwin got it right"

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by gnalle (125916)
      The two scientists have invented a nice way of visualizing repeated sequences in DNA, but the results are hardly controversial. They are doing something along the following lines: pixel(x,y) = getcolor(DNAsequence(x + 256*y))

        • Re:Lame (Score:5, Insightful)

          by mwvdlee (775178) on Thursday February 08 2007, @06:03AM (#17932216) Homepage
          Sound like they're claiming they made nice pictures using the genome data to generate them. Nothing more. Humans tend to see patterns in everything, it's in our nature. So no wonder we see patterns in those pictures. We'd probably see patterns in them if the input was purely random data.

  • Your chromosomes... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Riktov (632) on Thursday February 08 2007, @04:34AM (#17931910) Journal
    ...are heavily fragmented. This could degrade performance in creating offspring.

    Would you like to optimize your chromosomes?

    [Yes] [No] [Cancel]

  • Hey, baby. . .. (Score:5, Funny)

    by gardyloo (512791) on Thursday February 08 2007, @04:35AM (#17931916)
    Taste the rainbow!
  • Only a white page with nothing on it...

  • Oops (Score:5, Funny)

    by tehSpork (1000190) on Thursday February 08 2007, @04:51AM (#17931970)
    It looks like the DNA has been Slashdotted.

    Hopefully the next version will have developed a natural defense mechanism to handle the strain Slashdot puts on servers. :)

  • Arrgh! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 08 2007, @04:59AM (#17932006)
    My genes! They've been slashdotted!

    I need tissues!

  • I've seen that pattern before (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bl8n8r (649187) on Thursday February 08 2007, @07:55AM (#17932606)
    It's what the data segment of your app looks like when you accidentally dump it to vga video memory.

  • Genetics (Score:4, Funny)

    by worst_name_ever (633374) on Thursday February 08 2007, @08:32AM (#17932762)
    I don't even see the genes anymore - just blonde, brunette, redhead...

  • Heroes (Score:3, Funny)

    by kalirion (728907) on Thursday February 08 2007, @10:35AM (#17933778)
    So, which colors represent superpowers?

  • Completely pointless (Score:3, Interesting)

    by glwtta (532858) on Thursday February 08 2007, @01:09PM (#17935728) Homepage
    So, they gave each base-pair a color? What on earth is the point? 98% of that sequence doesn't do anything. And why is a virtually random sequence of pixels of 4 different colors "beautiful"?

    I can understand if they took two different genomes from the same species and did some kind of comparison: different colors for matches, indels, translocations, silent/synonymous/non-synonymous SNPs, etc. Or translated the sequence and colored by hydrophobicity/charge/polarity/whatever. Or showed haplotype conservation between species.

    At least that would tell you something, this is just a bunch of pixels with no meaning. A vaguely similar thing I've done was to plot plot SNP density (as color intensity) over the genome - but that was for a specific project, I didn't realize such things are "new visions".

    There are definitely prettier visualizations out there too: http://acg.media.mit.edu/people/fry/genomevalence [mit.edu]

    Even this [visualcomplexity.com] is a lot more informative (I think www.visualcomplexity.com was mentioned on slashdot a couple of years ago).

    • Human genome project scans just the 'upper level'
      Yea, it's real hard to get at that 'lower level' DNA hidden right on the inside, geez.

      Things are much more complicated there. It's like their binoculars captured upper boundary of the mountain range underneath.
      I... I... don't even know how to respond to your rambling misinformed bullshit. Just No!!! That's not it! That's not it at all!

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