No, not that kind of protein bar

Ever heard of protein sonification? That’s shorthand for creating music from patterns found in proteins. Each of the 20 amino acids found in proteins hums with a particular vibrational frequency; they can be mapped together as notes, chords, rhythm, or melody. In 2016 scientists designed software to assign a musical motif to the contours of a folded protein, in health and disease. Now another group has upped the ante, deploying artificial intelligence to create entirely new proteins by translating existing ones into musical scores, hoping they might be helpful in in biology, medicine, and engineering. In their new paper scientists report how they used machine learning to compose proteins that nature has not yet invented. While you ponder whether nature can be improved upon, you could hum a few bars of predatory marine snail venom.