Arabidopsis

A song about Arabidopsis Thaliana

A Musicians favourite plant’s supposed to be marijuana
But I prefer A dot thaliana
Unravelling DNA and all the drama
that entails

A model organism standing alone
With your 5 delectable chromosomes
Your genes provide a knockout selection
That I just wanna grow

The papers you’ve provided have been ample
Your my favourite genus of which to prepare a sample
For a run on
the Illumina machine

That the public don’t know you / thats unfair
But they can get your genome / thanks to TAIR
at arabidopsis.org
All the info’s there

A girls favourite flower is of the genus rosa
But a man who gives you those is just a poser
I wanna woman who knows the
ideas that mustard seeds

In a hundred years from now they’ll forget these days
How your hundred and 57 million base pairs paved the way
helping scientists investigate the function of genes in the DNA

Chorus

Why are there no pop hits / about arabidopsis

And all the hard work you doooo for plant science

noone knows your story / roses get the glory

but lets celebrate you in these modern times

Brownian Motion Blues

I’ve got Brownian motion / do you get the notion / behind my random moves / with other air molecules
Mostly its Nitrogen hanging round in pairs
with 21% of oxygen there
Water vapour and noble gases are also present….
…but they are pretty scarce

But I can’t go where I choose and that gives me the blues
I’m stuck in my own private hell
I never make friends with other air molecules
Trapped in a Whitley Bay Smoke Cell

I’ve got Brownian motion / do you get the notion / its bouncingly cool / being here
I can start close to the ground
transmitting pressure wave sounds
that bounce right
into your ears

A stochastic models been named / to capture my game
Its not something I say in jest
Though the scientists aims / were noble I’m shamed to be
modelled by The Weiner process

Did you know Brownian motion / applies in the ocean / its just that down here / its a little slower
than up there in the atmosphere
less energy to share around
so i’ve got less of a bounce

But I can’t go where I choose and that gives me the blues
I’m stuck in my own private hell
Bouncing around with similar molecules
I could be a metaphor for you

Destination In The Sky

A song about space elevators

I will get you there, from the planet into space
You’ll have to travel down to the equator first, to find my base
Take a good look at those seeing you off, it’ll be a while before you kiss her face
Now I’ll fling you from the surface of the earth and towards the counterweight

Its not like like in the old days / Of shuttles getting you into space
Booster rockets providing 25 million Newtons to kick off the escape
monomethyl hydrazine and tetroxide, variety nitrogen
when combined fuels that burn / without the need for oxygen

Before Colossal carbon tubes and graphene they/ wouldn’t of been able
To construct a 62,000 mile long /length of cable
Wider in the middle, tapering at the ends / its on this piece of magic your journey depends
In a climber that winds its way around it to sky / to minimise oscillations they must be carefully timed

I will take you there
I will take you high
I will get you to
Your destination in the sky

Telomere

Telomere / a simple repeated DNA sequence

at the end of a chromosone

our cells loose a bit of you each time they divide / and when we loose you we grow old and die

Mitosis is the process by
which cells manage to divide
In 71 Olovnikov recognised
there were limits to the enzymes

On which the process depends
They couldn’t go to the chromosone ends
Without loosing part of the DNA sequence
A fact from which there is no defense

But have no fear
At the ends lies the telomere
Everytime a cell divides
Some is sacrificed

Although we need you to live
for that we give you praise
In cancerous cells there’s too much of you
Thanks to an excess of telomerase
Thats the enzyme from which
A telomere is made
Something that should only exist
In stem cells, after that we degrade