Music inspires proteins and scientists alike

Musical macromoleculesThis Newscriptster has long had a fascination with the proteins piccolo and bassoon after learning about them in high school. These proteins act as scaffolds in neurons, helping to regulate and organize the release of neurotransmitters between cells. They have nothing to do with woodwind instruments. So why give them such musical names? The same team first documented piccolo and bassoon in 1996 and 1998, respectively, and were thus responsible for the proteins’ musical monikers (Eur. J. Cell Biol. 1996, 69, 214–223; J. Cell Biol. 1998, DOI: 10.1083/jcb.142.2.499)Eckart Gundelfinger, one of the leaders of those teams and now a professor emeritus at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, tells Newscripts that the names for these instrumentally inclined molecules came from how they interact with other proteins.“We reasoned that these proteins have to interplay like musical instruments in an orchestra to serve a perfect synaptic harmony,” Gundelfinger says in an email. Piccolo came from a joke from a then-graduate student, Claudia Cases-Langhoff, who was having trouble with the giant protein. Piccolo the protein is 420 kilodaltons, while a piccolo is one of the smallest wind instruments. Bassoon’s name comes from Gundelfinger’s favorite symphony instrument. Other scientists later followed the same line of thinking. Peri Kurshan, an associate professor of neuroscience at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, says in an email that she and her colleagues named a protein in Caenorhabditis elegans clarinet because it’s similar to bassoon and piccolo.Other musical proteins include tuba, which is also concentrated in neurons, and