DNA Sonification refers to the use of audio to convey the information content of a DNA sequence. One approach is to create audio using the rules of gene expression whereby codons are played as musical notes (Temple, 2017). Using this approach DNA can be processed to read each of three reading frames and create interleaved streams of audio (giving rise to triplet notes). Within each frame, start and stop codons are used to control the beginning and end of the audio. These algorithmic approaches give rise to an auditory display which is informative of the input DNA sequence. These sonification tools are available through a webpage interface in which an input sequence can be processed in real-time, available at http://dnasonification.org.
The potential of this approach to contribute to existing visual tools has been discussed in Nature (Perkel, 2017). Using the auditory displays, DNA sequences derived from simple nucleotide sequences, repetitive DNA sequences, gene coding sequences or non-coding genes can be distinguished from one another.
Here we report an update to the sonification website running these tools to make them more accessible to modern browsers and operating systems (including mobile devices). To achieve this much of the server based code was re-written in client-side JavaScript. This is advantageous since it allows the audio to be generated in real-time within the browser using the WebAudio API. Additionally the Canvas element of HTML5 was used to generate an interactive visual animation that is in-sync with the audio.
The potential use of sonification for sequence analyses remains largely unexplored and it is an exciting area of bioinformatic research (BMC Series blog). Current work is focused on developing new auditory displays to analyse other sequence attributes and metadata. The overall goal is to improve the potential of these tools to represent DNA function and evolution.