Team:EMW Street Bio
Biota Beats is a microbiome record player developed by EMW Street Bio iGEM team.
Concept
The combination of arts and science captures our imaginations with compelling narratives of initiative and innovation. People go beyond traditional ways to work in whatever medium best fits their skills and messages. By rooting stories in authenticity, people can spark emotion and action, transmit values and information, foster collaboration, and invent the future.
Lifeforms inhabiting the surface of our bodies need a form of communication for people to understand the information those lifeforms contained. What if we can hear the physical attributes of a microbiota? Music, as a universal language, suggests a certain wholeness. Sonification of the microbiome is an attempt to engage the public and provide a better understanding of the random nature of gene expression, cellular changes, and bacterial evolutions. Such an undertaking can bring personal understanding to what is going on with the surface of our bodies.
What if you could make music from your microbiota?
That’s what our community biology lab at EMW Street Bio wanted to find out.
Our team has built a record player called Biota Beats that can hold a petri dish plated with
cultures from the human microbiome. Currently, a still image is taken of the colonies and
translated into sound by a program coded by one of our teammates, but the ultimate vision
for Biota Beats is real-time tracking of colonies and conversion of a video into sound.
With Biota Beats, you’ll be able to listen to music from different cultures!
