Genetic Calligraphy

When sequencing DNA, biologists submit 200 to 400 base pairs, or "letters" of genetic code, at a time into a lightning fast computer algorithm called BLAST and the system finds a match against the billions of letters for known genes. BLAST is well known among biologists, but few people in the public are aware of it.

In a unique attempt to change that, an art exhibit called "Ecce Homology" appeared at SIGGRAPH 2005 in Los Angeles from July 31 to August 4. Named after Friedrich Nietzcsche's Ecce Homo--a meditation on how one becomes what one is--the "bioart" exhibit explored human evolution by examining similarities between human genes and another organism, in this case a rice plant.

Custom software turned human and rice plant genes into luminous pictograms that resembled Chinese or Sanskrit calligraphy. The exhibit was interactive: visitors could trace shapes using their arms and when the shapes sufficiently matched a human gene, the computer displayed the rice plant version of the gene on a screen superimposed over the human one.  The image above shows the pictogram representing the DNA sequence that codes for the human salivary protein, alpha 1A.

"This high-dimensional visualization reduces the complexity of sequence codes to the sorts of shapes or patterns that a human being can make sense of," said Ruth West, a microbiologists and artists who headed the project. "It is an artistic approach to extracting what's important. And it is also an exploration of what art might have to offer for discovery in the sciences." 

--Ker Than

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Credit: Ruth West