Theme and variations, musical transposition of prion protein sequences into music and retrotransposition of musical motifs into protein sequences
Résumé
Prions are a class of protein which are able to propagate their conformational state and have therefore been termed infectious. Prions found in microbes, in particular in fungi constitute good model systems to study the structural basis of prion propagation. A specific prion from the species Podospora anserina termed HET-s is currently the only prion of which the 3D structure was solved. We have identified a series of several hundred variant forms of this prion motif in different fungal genomes. In an approach akin to phenomenological reduction, we aim at a better understanding of the essential characteristics of a prion motif. As a complement or alternative to standard bioinformatics analysis methods that we have applied, we wondered whether an esthetic approach of the question could provide further insights of the biological order governing this system. We engaged into an “art and science” project supported by IdEx-Université de Bordeaux and proposed to a musician (Clément Libes) to transpose the prion protein sequences musically in the form of a classical “theme and variations” approach and in return will synthesize, as peptides, retro-transposed musical motifs that musically fit the original theme. The project is currently at an initial stage but we will present the biological background of the project and the envisioned possible outcomes