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The Sound of Cells
Alert Slashdot reader jamie pointed out a story in Smithsonian Magazine on the subject of listening to the sounds cells make in order to detect abnormalities.
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From the article: Pelling agrees, and says that he and Gimzewski are doing tests to rule out the possibility that other molecules in the fluid bathing the cells, or even the tip of the microscope itself, are generating vibrations that their probe picks up.
Even if this is the case, because of a cells small molecular fingerprint or components tend to dictate what role a cell plays or what the status of a cell is on a more discrete time basis that say gene expression, one would wonder if this is not also an identifier of status or identity as well. For more detail on cytosomics or metabolomics, see this site.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I wonder if they rock out or are they more into the hip-hop scene?
spend money here
I hear the things beeping all over the place now. Little tinny tunes like Mexican Hat Dance too.
Oh, sorry, thought you said cell PHONES.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Even more voices to listen too...
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
do cells use nanophones?
Cancer is always listening to Limp Biskit with the booming base spreading all over the neighborhood. Cancer cells also have superfluous spoilers and purple neon undercarriages.
It's the Midichlorians. You'll hear them too when you learn to quiet your mind.
This is one of those things is basically an inevitability, waiting only for the proper tools to exist.
Reminds me of how a mechanic might listen to an engine, or part of it, to determine what's going on inside.
They hook up these big amplifiers to a sensitive microphone. When they hear a cell screaming like a madman, they know it's a bad mutation and wipe out the cell. GATTACA indeed.
"Get your body in shape you insensitive clod"
I hear dead people
So from now on doctors will press their ear all over our skin and go "Hark! I think I detect a cancer cell!"
Hey man, just relax and bend over the examining table while I prep this guitar tuner for insertion....
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
Skin Cell 1: Hey I saw you on the cover of Scientific American!
Skin Cell 2: Palez! The photo totally made me look fat!
Skin Cell 3: Jesus, just take the complement!
Aren't there lots of stories about dolphins bumping swimmers repeatedly with their snouts, causing a medical examination which discovers a tumor? I haven't heard any theories that dolphins are causing the tumors (though they'd have plenty of material for revenge), but these bigbrained cousins are notorious for their sense of sound, superior to our sight. Maybe we should be certifying them, instead of crudely replacing them with machines.
--
make install -not war
I've used audio feedback in conjunction with network monitoring, and it worked VERY well. I was developing a SOAP-based client/server app, and I tied a different sound (MIDI note actually, sometimes from the percussion instrument, sometimes ascending chords on piano) to each type of message the client and server could send.
In the course of a standard interaction, it would play login, login ack, getlist, getlist-resp, etc. I could hear the timing between calls (yeh, SOAP is kind of slow like that), and more importantly hear if it was doing the right things. You pick it up *immediately* when a chord progression is major, minor, or just plain wrong), All this without taking up any screen real estate.
This works so well, I recommend it highly. AFAIK there are no standard ways of doing this, but it certainly would be great to put some standard techniques and libraries together!
Who cares if we can actually hear cells split.
...like, when you have Ride of Valkiries as your ring-tone
..all play Beethoven's 5th.
What is your penile percentile?
Is that where all those voices in my head have been coming from?
This is old news, ever since Meg healed her little brother Charles Wallace by teaching his cells how to sing. Or Kythe. Or something.
Whenever a protein or enzyme in a cell changes shape, it should induce characteristic vibrations in the surround media. Each enzyme would emit its own characteristic vibrations when it undergoes a change in shape as it catalyzes a reaction or does its business.
For example, I'd bet nerve cells give off sounds as the propagating impulse causes cell-surfane ion channels to pop open and closed. The ion pumps that restore ion concentrations would also emit a hum with characteristic frequencies. For membrane-embedded enzymes (e.g., the channels on nerve cells), interferometry off the membrane surface might help to detect these minute vibrations. I wonder if one could even detect the sound of prions forming when a protein is warped into the misshaped conformation that characterizes conditions like BSE -- sound of a brain going mad.
I'd bet that one could also analyze protein/enzyme states with a fine-grained analysis of the sound transfer function for a cell. Depending on the physical state of each protein species and its concentration, a cell would attenuate or resonate with particular acoustic frequencies. Large cell structures (e.g. mitochondria) might also have their own characteristic acoustical modulation functions that depend on the size and membrane structure. If analyzing the transfer function for a live, wet cell is too hard, I suspect that flash-freezing the cell might create a better acoustical specimen.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I wonder why sound isn't used more for the detection of all sorts of mechanical malfunctions. After all, I hear if something is wrong with my car.
-Max
Hello darkness, my old friend, I've come to talk with you again, Because a vision softly creeping, Left its seeds while I was sleeping, And the vision that was planted in my brain Still remains Within the sound of silence.
Anyway, these guys have already prooved that, in some situations, is very hard to get useful information throught sound, even when you know what you may be looking for.
...cos if someone drops a nail while you're listening to your cells, it will sound like having your head inside a giant church bell at midnight.
Diego Rey
diegoT
Just like in Blood Music. Now I wonder what cells has to say...
"I think this line is mostly filler"
I hope they continue to delve into the olefactory sences as well. They found out that some dogs can smell melanoma. Combine that with sound technology and we can get the lousy HMO check up process out of the way. "Hey doc, whats with this mole on my boob?" "Its a third nipple." "No shit, are you sure it's not cancer" "Of course I'm sure, I'm a doctor!"
-"Food is disgusting, it's what they make shit from."-
Things you don't want to hear from your cells:
...and the number one thing:
"I was thinking of redecorating the place; d'you think some melanoma would look good here?"
"C'mon, all the cool kids are having apoptosis! You're not chicken, are you?"
"The mitochondria must be liberated!"
"Hey, alcohol! Irish stout! All right, time for Liverdance!"
"Ouch!"
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
Sprinkling alcohol on a yeast cell to kill it raises the pitch
Won't someone please think of the yeast cells?
My sig sucks.
to get them to use the little microphones. --AC
Or the ringer is the Emperor's march (Darth Vader doom song) when the wife calls.
I have 1 million monkeys on a million year contract to make me a better sig.
It's a sin, IT'S A SIN! Stop it! For the love of God, please, STOP IT!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Joe Davis is an artist and research affiliate at MIT's Department of Biology. He and other MIT students and faculty assembled a similar system ca. 1999-2000.
Davis is an interesting guy who's gotten a fair amount of professional and media attention for his intriguing work in genetic and biological postmodern art.
The LA Weekly had an article on this in the April 4-10, 2003, issue: Buckyballs and Screaming Cells: The amazing miniature world of UCLA chemist Jim Gimzewski
James Gimzewski's Website: Pico Lab
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
Maybe they're just hungry, for brain cells...
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Alert Slashdot reader jamie pointed out a story in Smithsonian Magazine...
Maybe jamie's cells sounded the alert...
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
I'm not saying the work is bad or anything (I think it shows very novel thinking), but this hasn't been peer reviewed. This is important. Until the work has been scrutinized by experts in the field you can not tell whether or not something is statistically or scientifically significant.
No, peer review is not a perfect process, but its the best one we have. Scientists and the press need to remember this before they make claims about scientific work.
At least this article mentions the fact.
Some men spend their entire lives trying to kill themselves for having been born. --Ross MacDonald
But the question is, are they into karaoke? Or maybe there's another way someone with an entrepeneural spirit could capitalize on this.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Until you realise the article isn't about cell phones..
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
1000 Hz is actually about two octaves above middle C, not one as the article states.
It's two different songs:
La Cucaracha:
"La Cucaracha, La Cucaracha
Peanut butter comes in jars"
Mexican Hat Dance:
"I dance
I dance
I dance
Around a Mexican hat
I dance
I dance
I dance
And that's the end of that"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
But what do you do if they have a really annoying ring?
Our greatest enemy is neither a single man, nor is it a nation, it is, as it has always been, our own greed.
Hehe, now when the cells split in mitosis, you can hear all the "Ahhhhhh!" and "OOOOOOOHHH YEAH!" cell sex noises that they are sure to make.
Their new Music ID service they just came out with was just the beginning!! Their ACTUAL plans are for you to eventually dial their service; place the phone next to your chest and you'll receive a text message telling you if you cancer or not.
....Incoming text message......
"You have 3 months left to live...."
"Have a nice day!"
....move along....nothing to see here....
with the sound of caaaanceeeer! (ahhhh-ahhhhhhh!)
Man! i dont know why i watch cartoon network so much, but i think it has some potential! i watched an episode last week in which Dexter was actually performing this very same experiment! only different being, he finds a virus-boy band! i guess i am a loser ;)
My cell plays the Mexican Hat Dance.
psh, big deal. everybody knows that...
the coolest club on
Each person could be implanted with a small, embedded device to monitor, run diagnostics, and transmit an alert to a monitoring station, just like our servers.
Of course the danger of friends hacking your system there is apparent: ;)
knock knock "Uh...Mr.Jones? Its the paramedics, we're here about your um...Hamster problem. Don't worry, we brought the KY!"
Bad experience is a school that only fools keep going to.
Ahh but they already have! The infamous mad scientist Professor Hubert Farnsworth has already invented smelloscope, a great leap forward for the field of astronomy. Just don't use it to smell Uranus, er, Urectum...
Sapere aude!
"Mitosis? Hey, buddy, I didn't know it was yours! Is this thing on? Come on, I know you're out there--I can hear you metabolizing..."
Keep in mind, though, that the measurement method he used is going to average the conformational changes of all of the proteins within a cell - averaging a large number of independent random variables gives you an approximately Gaussian distribution, i.e., noise.
That being said, there are cells that use conformational changes to cause motion at audio frequencies. Outer hair cells (OHCs) in your cochlea exhibit length changes in response to changes in transmembrane voltage, with a gain of about 20 nm/mV. They do this using a protein called Prestin - there's still some debate about how it works in detail, but the protein completely covers the lateral walls of the cell membranes. Transfecting other cells with this protein caused them to be motile, and knocking out this protein killed the motility of OHCs.
Without some kind of specialization like that, I find it hard to believe that an entire cell can exhibit a spontaneous oscillation like what's been reported here. I smell the presence of an experimental artefact.
On stereophonic equipment, the monaural sound obtained through multiple channels will enhance your listening pleasure.
If they are measuring vibrations generated by the AFM tip then they have a problem.
If they are measuring vibrations generated by the fluid bathing the cells (these are in vitro preparations, right?) how could this be useful?
For what it's worth, the idea that came to him in 2001 is called Atomic Force Sensing, and is actually about five years older than that. The only difference is that Gimzewski is looking at spontaneous oscillations rather than driven oscillations - and that's where the difficulty lies, because it's very, very hard to show that those oscillations are due to activity of the cells and not, say, vibrations caused by a truck driving by outside. I'm skeptical that these oscillations are coming from the cells (as you can tell from my other posts in response to this article), but if they are, it suggests a very, very interesting mechanism that we know nothing about.
On stereophonic equipment, the monaural sound obtained through multiple channels will enhance your listening pleasure.
I wrote a senior undergrad thesis in college, some twenty years ago, on this subject. See what happens when you don't pursue an idea?
Debunking the "59 Deceits"