SpiderSilkMusic

Spider Silk and Music.

Comparing the structure-function relationships in spider silk and a musical composition. Ontology Logs (ologs) connects spider silk and music.

MIT researchers claim that there is a deep relation between the lightweight strength in spider silk and the sonic structure of a melody in a music composition. This may be beneficial for the development of materials with repeating patterns. Spider silk has a repeating structure at nano level. The step-by-step comparison begins with the primary building blocks: an amino acid and a sound wave, and moves up to the level of a beta sheet nanocomposite (the secondary structure of a protein consists of repeated hierarchical patterns of protein assemblages) and a musical riff (a repeated pattern of notes or chords). 

i)   nanotech-now.com
ii)  crazyengineers.com 

iii) web.mit.edu

PLoS ONE: Protein 3D Structure Computed from Evolutionary Sequence Variation

Here is another interesting example (olog) of structure-function relationships: the prediction of the protein 3D structure from the aminoacid sequence (including a GPCR membrane protein). The blinded inferences are de novo, i.e., they do not use homology modeling or sequence-similar fragments from known structures. The co-evolution signals provide sufficient information to determine accurate 3D protein structure to 2.7–4.8 Å Cα-RMSD error relative to the observed structure, over at least two-thirds of the protein (method called EVfold, details at http://EVfold.org/). This discovery provides insight into essential interactions constraining protein evolution and will facilitate a comprehensive survey of the universe of protein structures, new strategies in protein and drug design, and the identification of functional genetic variants in normal and disease genomes.