DNA-rainbow, A New Vision of Human Chromosomes

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."

Good Science/Art websites?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, does anybody have other good Science/Art websites they can share? I remember having a book, "On the Surface of Things" I think, that basically had lots of colorized/slightly manipulated images from science and technology. Some the shots were magnificient, surprising,and intriguing all at once. I had always thought that sort of thing would be a good tool for educators to get children (or adults) more interested in science. On a side note, I also wanted to set up a website community to bring together artists and scientists to see what how they might collaborate. Never got around to it of course, but has anyone seen anything similar?

Re:Lame

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever seen the movie pi? [imdb.com]
Unfortunately Slashdot will not render:

&#928

Hey, it looks like piet source code!

[MrTrick]

Piet is an 'esoteric' (useless) programming language that reads bitmaps as source files.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_(programming_lan guage) [wikipedia.org]
http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html [dangermouse.net]

It'd be nice to be able to load the chromasomes up into the piet interpreter, and see what comes out!

Wouldn't it be interesting, though, if it turns out that the genome could be understood as a 'program', and a specially coded interpreter could process it... ... what would the binaries do?

Re:Lame

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Mendeleev notwithstanding.

Re:A pattern is a patterns is a pattern

[VirusEqualsVeryYes]

That [ebay.com] can [bbc.co.uk] be [riverusers.com] applied [cbsnews.com] to [wkyc.com] sightings [nbc10.com] of [bbc.co.uk] many [optusnet.com.au] other [snafu.de] things [nbcsandiego.com].

The [ebay.com] problem [ebay.com] is [farshores.org], how [metro.co.uk] does [wkyc.com] one [jsonline.com] determine [goldenpalaceevents.com] which [pittsburghlive.com] patterns [local6.com] indicate [nbc5.com] something [nbc5.com] and [nbc5.com] which [nbc5.com] patterns [nbc5.com] are [nbc5.com] just [nbc5.com] convincing [wtol.com] illusions [reuters.com]?

Re:Lame

[Angst Badger]

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, as some skeptics here have suggested, random in its appearance.

Re:Lame

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

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"

Completely pointless

[glwtta]

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).