The Soundtrack of Science | TS Digest

Barbara Di Ventura, a synthetic biologist at the University of Freiburg, blends her love of music and science into catchy musical abstracts.

Markus Schwerer, Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Meet Barbara Di Ventura, an engineer turned synthetic biologist at the University of Freiburg, who explores protein dynamics across cell types. Outside of the laboratory, she moonlights as a musician. Di Ventura harmonizes her passion for art and science in musical abstracts, using a guitar to riff about her latest research, transforming scientific communication into a lively experience.

What inspired you to start creating musical abstracts?

I was inspired by Uri Alon, a systems biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, who played the guitar and sang songs about his group’s projects in an entertaining way. Then in 2021, we published a paper on a novel optogenetic tool for controlling gene expression in bacteria, and I had this vision to write a song about it.¹ We’re constantly asked to describe our work in new ways despite the numerous figures we produce. To me, writing song lyrics is easier than new text. The song “American Pie” came to mind, and it sounded cool with “Bye-bye, L-arabinose drive,” where L-arabinose is the normal inducer of this system.

How has the scientific community responded to your musical abstracts?

I post two-minute musical abstracts on X, and I’ve received a lot of positive comments. Our last video had more than 35,000 views. It had a humorous tone and described a predictive tool called Int&in for identifying key components of protein splicing, active and inactive split sites, in intein protein segments.² I sang about how this tool saved me time and improved my work-life balance. I hope this work inspires others to develop novel split inteins and study protein-protein interactions. Even if only a few people watch until the end, it brings me joy if just one person remembers our work for the music. I hope more people adopt this format.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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