From Genome Technology Online July 30, 2007: If a Patented Gene Appears in a Song, Who Gets the Royalty?

Sure, genetic music was the out-of-left-field offshoot of the Human Genome Project, but we can’t deny that the field — such as it is — has shown surprising longevity. If you have a free minute, check out this newly issued patent. It covers “music generated by decoding and transcribing genetic information within a DNA sequence into a music signal having melody and harmony,” according to the abstract. The inventors listed are a couple of lawyers (hence the title of this post).

There are seven comments, including the following:

Oh, those lawyers! Too bad, they don’t really invent anything, they only use somebody else’s stuff. The music derived from nucleic acid sequences was created long time ago. Back in 1995 a tape with such music was available and distributed at the international conference on the structure and function of the ribosome in Victoria, British Columbia. Anybody who wanted could get a tape at the conference. The music was not a timeless masterpiece, but it was cohesive and even somewhat pleasing. The tape was in 1995, clearly the idea was even before that.

Here are some samples of gene music from another source The following is the Huntingtin protein.

For those in the know, you can hear an obvious repeated pattern of glutamines and polyprolines in this sample.