The Stellenbosch Microbiome Musical

As final year students at Stellenbosch University, we were given the instruction in our last semester as undergrad students to design and carry our own practical for our microbiology module relating to microbial ecology. So as any savvy undergrad students would do, we immediately started scouring through various scientific articles and journals in order to find something we could use as a base for our practicals during the seven week peroid we have to carry out our experiments. 

One article we found online immediately caught our attention: "Microbial Bebop: Creating Music from Complex Dynamics in Microbial Ecology" (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0058119). The concept of translating complex data sets into a sonic format in order to involve the non-scientific public seemed to us like an ingenious idea. In order to gain a better comprehension of how the data was converted into music, we emailed one of the authors, associate professor at Chicago University, Jack Gilbert, and set up a skype meeting.

 
During our skype meeting, Jack assisted our group immensely by helping us in formulating exactly what we will be basing our practicals on for the semester. He suggested that we use the data from the paper "Host lifestyle affects human microbiota on daily timescales" (http://genomebiology.com/2014/15/7/R89) in order to generate music from the microbiomes of the two subjects studied in the paper. During our skype meeting with Jack, Peter Larsen (the creator of the microbial bepop sofware) also joined in and further helped guide our group in explaining what would be needed to create the music.

Our next step was to contact one of the authors of "Host lifestyle affects human microbiota on daily timescales" in order to find out if they would be willing for us to use the data they collected in their study in our experient. We contacted one of the authors, an associate professor at Duke University, Lawrence David, to find out. In the skype meeting with Lawrence, we explained to him what we are planning to do and he gave us the go ahead to use the data collected in their study. He also sent us data sets generated for their original study in order to help us with the handling of the data. 

With the data we have assembled we aim to generate sheet music by using Peter Larsen's microbial bebop sofware to sonically explore the unique microbiomes of the subject's involved in Lawrence David's study. 

After the generation of the sheet music, we will be approaching a local primary school choir to convey the differences and similarities of the two individual's microbiomes in an acapella musical. In this manner we hope to involve the local community, the non-scientific public as well as the youth in science. 

The group will be updating this blog weekly in order to track our progress and hopefully generate greater public interest in science.