Applied Biophysics ECIS Real Time Cell Growth Monitoring

Music of the Cells

Cell Motility and other morphological changes result in a constant fluctuation of the measured ECIS impedance. In an attempt to have fun, but perchance to learn more about the subtle differences in cell behaviour we have generated music from these impedance fluctuations.

Power Spectra of Cells

A traditional method to analyze fluctuating signals is to generate the power spectrum of the data as shown below for two different cell lines. Statistical methods such as this, however, can fail to detect subtle differences in the signals. This limitation is demonstrated by a similar analysis of the music. The power spectrum has been calculated for each of the several musical pieces. In spite of the ear's ability to clearly distinguish between music of Beethoven and the Beatles, these compositions appear nearly identical in this analysis.

Power Spectra of Music

We decided to capitalize upon the ability of the human ear to possibly discern differences in impedance fluctuations not revealed in mathematical analysis.

The Songs of the cultured cell, the resistive portion of the impedance is used to select a pitch, whereas the capacitance is used to set the duration of the note. For the musically inclined, we elected to use pitches from a major scale for normal and a minor scale for transformed (cancer) cells.