DNA rainbow

DNA-rainbow in the news...

• What is the idea?
  • Maybe you still know it from school: Each cell of a human being has two sets of 23 chromosomes, each set received from one parent. Every chromosome is a long and continuous piece of DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid) which contains many genes and other elements. The backbone of the DNA carries four types of molecules called bases (A, C, G, T). The sequence of these four bases encodes the information and is the genetic code of all of us.
  • We took the genetic code from huge data files and assigned a color to every of the four bases. Then we rendered these fascinating pictures, showing the genetic code of humans in color. You can see crazy structures and strange patterns in the images, best viewed when shutting your eyes just a little bit. Click on a link to a chromosome above and use your imagination to get a new view of your genes.
• Why do we do this?
  • We are both scientists and wanted to create an interesting project apart of our daily business. It is a mix between science, art and curiosity and represents our interests. The project is absolutely non-profit oriented and may inspire others.
  • Although scientists know already most of the sequence of the human DNA, the information the genetic code helds is not fully understood. Therefore we want to introduce a new idea to display and maybe better understand the code. Structures and repeating bases can be recognized faster and by resizing an image with an appropriate algorithm it is possible to get a quick overview of different sections in the chromosome.
• Intended audience
  • The website is not only meant for scientists. Newbies and interested people are also welcome and therefore we tried to write and explain the basics in an easy way. This might not always be absolutely correct from a scientists's point of view, but it is more important to us that a lot of people can understand what we're doing and maybe to revive interest in genetics.
• Why are there grey lines and areas in the DNA pictures?
  • By far not all bases of the chromosomes are known. There are quite a few places where it is very difficult or impossible to determine the bases with today known equipment. Therefore the grey pixels and lines indicate unknown areas of the chromosome.
• Why are there slight structures in the images?
  • Some repeating base sequences can be seen very easily, but there are also slight structures in pictures we don't know where they come from. There are different possibilities. Maybe there is additional information modulated into the chromosome (comparable to FM radio where a lowpass signal (information 1) is transmitted over a bandpass channel (information 2)). This is open to discussion and we would appreciate comments and ideas.
  • It is important to note that the structures depend on the image width. If an image is rendered with a different width, you get a different structure. But it seems that the strutures occur on most sizes.
    
• What did you decide when rendering the pictures? What problems did you encounter?
  • We decided what color each base has. The picture would look different of course when we would have selected other colors, but we went close to colors used when determining DNA sequences. Furthermore we decided to set the width of every image to 3500 pixels.
  • We had to cope with single data file sizes with more than 250 Megabytes and ended with an image height of over 70.000 pixels only for chromosome 1. Rendering all chromosomes takes hours.
• You are exactly what I need. I have a job offer for you.
  • Wow! You can decide between a person just graduated in biotechnology from university or a talented PHP web application developer with five years experience. You can also hire us together. ;-) Please write us an e-mail to request our CV. We are very interested in new and interesting jobs worldwide.
    
• What ressources did you use?
  • Besides reading countless articles from different authors, we have used the following sources that helped us a lot for creating this project: NCBI and the ideogram browser.

  If the FAQ didn't answer your question, please don't hesitate to contact us.