Tag Archives: bioelectricity

The sound of the mushroom

A May 13, 2022 article by Philip Drost for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) As It Happens radio programme highlights the “From funky fungi to melodious mangos, this artist makes music out of nature” segment of the show, Note: Links have been removed,

At the intersection of biology and electronic music, you can find Tarun Nayar plugging his synthesizer equipment into mushrooms and other forms of plant life, hoping to capture their invisible bioelectric rhythms and build them into tranquil soundscapes. 

“What I’m really doing is trying to stimulate joy and wonder and create these little sketches or vignettes using the plants themselves, so I like to think of it as definitely a collaboration,” Nayar told As It Happens guest host Helen Mann.

Nayar is an electronic musician and former biologist in Vancouver who uses his TikTok account and Youtube page, Modern Biology, to show off his serenading spores. And his videos have millions of views.

To make his fungi sing, Nayar uses little jumper cables to connect the vegetation with his synthesizer and measure their biological energy, or bioelectricity, which has an effect on the notes. 

“The mushroom is contributing the pitch changes and the rhythm, and the synthesizer, which I have the mushroom plugged into, is contributing the timbre or the quality of the sound,” Nayar said. 

You may be familiar with Nayar’s work (from a Creative Mornings Vancouver About The Speaker webpage for a talk given on July 3, 2020), Note: Links have been removed,

Tarun Nayar has built his world at intersections. Of east and west. Of music and business. Of science and art. Born to a white Canadian mother and an immigrant Indian father in French Canada, he has always lived in multiple worlds. He is comfortable in discomfort and fascinated with helping people find common ground, opening doors, and equalling the playing field. He is passionate about changing perceptions and championing unheard stories and talent.

rained formally in Indian Classical Music from the age of seven, Tarun’s involvement in Vancouver’s underground electronic music scene in his early 20s led to the formation of well-known Canadian band Delhi 2 Dublin [emphasis mine] in 2006. He has since led the band to Glastonbury (UK), Hardly Strictly Bluegrass (US), Woodford (AUS) and hundreds of other club and festival gigs around the world. Tarun is passionate about creating opportunities in the arts for people of colour. He is Executive Director of 5X Festival [emphasis mine], one of North America’s largest South Asian festivals. He is on the board of Vancouver’s New Forms Festival, the Canadian Live Music Association, and a member of BC’s Ministry of Education Advisory Committee, Vancouver’s Music City Task Force, and Vancouver’s 2018 Juno Host City Committee. Tarun manages emerging Pakistani-Canadian electronic artist Khanvict, and is the co-founder and owner of digital label Snakes x Ladders [emphasis mine] which focuses on the new wave of hybrid South Asian artists.

As best I can determine after looking at the Modern Biology YouTube channel and Tik Tok account, Nayar seems to have started his project or made it public about 10 months ago (August 2021?). There’s lots of mushroom music along with fruit music, and flower music in either location although Tik Tok seems have a more complete collection.

There’s also a Modern Biology page on linktree.ee where you can sign up for an email list. It also features a link to PlantWave, (Note: This is not a product endorsement),

$299.00 USD

Listen to the music of plants. Tune into Nature with PlantWave!

PlantWave allows you to wirelessly connect from your plant to your phone, making it easier than ever to listen to nature’s song.

Pre-orders will ship June of 2022. We sold out of our January run of devices before shipping. Thank you for your patience as we do our best to meet demand for this experience.

Package Includes:

Hardware

PlantWave Plant Music Device

Electrode leads

3 pairs of reusable sticky pads for leaves

Duck beak clips for smaller plants

USB C cable for charging / data transmission

Free iOS / Android App

….

Enjoy!

Electrifying DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid)

All kinds of things have electrical charges including DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) according to an April 15, 2015 news item on Azonano,

Electrical charges not only move through wires, they also travel along lengths of DNA, the molecule of life. The property is known as charge transport.

In a new study appearing in the journal Nature Chemistry, authors, Limin Xiang, Julio Palma, Christopher Bruot and others at Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute, explore the ways in which electrical charges move along DNA bases affixed to a pair of electrodes.

Their work reveals a new mechanism of charge transport that differs from the two recognized patterns in which charge either tunnels or hops along bases of the DNA chain.

An April 13, 2015 Arizona State University (ASU) news release (also on EurekAlert and dated April 14, 2015), which originated the news item, explains why this ‘blue sky’ research may prove important in the future,

Researchers predict that foundational work of this kind will have important implications in the design of a new generation of functional DNA-based electronic devices as well as providing new insights into health risks associated with transport-related damage to DNA.

Oxidative damage is believed to play a role in the initiation and progression of cancer. It is also implicated in neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s disease and Parkinson’s disease and a range of other human afflictions.

An electron’s movements plays an important role in your body’s chemical reactions (from the news release),

The transfer of electrons is often regarded as the simplest form of chemical reaction, but nevertheless plays a critical role in a broad range of life-sustaining processes, including respiration and photosynthesis.

Charge transport can also produce negative effects on living systems, particularly through the process of oxidative stress, which causes damage to DNA and has been invoked in a broad range of diseases.

“When DNA is exposed to UV light, there’s a chance one of the bases– such as guanine–gets oxidized, meaning that it loses an electron,” Tao says. (Guanine is easier to oxidize than the other three bases, cytosine, thymine, and adenine, making it the most important base for charge transport.)

In some cases, the DNA damage is repaired when an electron migrates from another portion of the DNA strand to replace the missing one. DNA repair is a ceaseless, ongoing process, though a gradual loss of repair efficiency over time is one factor in the aging process. Oxidation randomly damages both RNA and DNA, which can interfere with normal cellular metabolism.

Radiation damage is also an issue for semiconductor devices, Tao notes–a factor that must be accounted for when electronics are exposed to high-energy particles like X rays, as in applications designed for outer space.

Researchers like Xiang and Tao hope to better understand charge transport through DNA, and the molecule provides a unique testing ground for observation. The length of a DNA molecule and its sequence of 4 nucleotides A, T, C and G can be readily modified and studies have shown that both alterations have an effect on how electrical charge moves through the molecule.

When the loss of an electron or oxidation occurs in DNA bases, a hole is left in place of the electron. This hole carries a positive charge, which can move along the DNA length under the influence of an electrical or magnetic field, just as an electron would. The movement of these positively charged holes along a stretch of DNA is the focus of the current study.

The news release goes on to describe charge transport,

Two primary mechanisms of charge transport have been examined in detail in previous research. Over short distances, an electron displays the properties of a wave, permitting it to pass straight through a DNA molecule. This process is a quantum mechanical effect known as tunneling.

Charge transport in DNA (and other molecules) over longer distances involves the process of hopping. When a charge hops from point to point along the DNA segment, it behaves classically and loses its wavelike properties. The electrical resistance is seen to increases exponentially during tunneling behavior and linearly, during hopping.

By attaching electrodes to the two ends of a DNA molecule, the researchers were able to monitor the passage of charge through the molecule, observing something new: “What we found in this particular paper is that there is an intermediate behavior,” Tao says. “It’s not exactly hopping because the electron still displays some of the wave properties.”

Instead, the holes observed in certain sequences of DNA are delocalized, spread over several base pairs. The effect is neither a linear nor exponential increase in electrical resistance but a periodic oscillation. The phenomenon was shown to be highly sequence dependent, with stacked base pairs of guanine-cytosine causing the observed oscillation.

Control experiments where G bases alternated, rather than occurring in a sequential stack, showed a linear increase in resistance with molecular length, in agreement with conventional hopping behavior.

A further property of DNA is also of importance in considering charge transport. The molecule at room temperature is not like a wire in a conventional electronic device, but rather is a highly dynamic structure, that writhes and fluctuates.

The last bit about writhing and fluctuating makes this work sound fascinating and very challenging.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Intermediate tunnelling–hopping regime in DNA charge transport by Limin Xiang, Julio L. Palma, Christopher Bruot, Vladimiro Mujica, Mark A. Ratner, & Nongjian Tao. Nature Chemistry 7, 221–226 (2015) doi:10.1038/nchem.2183 Published online 20 February 2015

This paper is behind a paywall.