Play the right bases and you'll hear Bach - Susumu Ohno has assigned musical notes to nucleotide bases

''Plagiarism . . . is a guiding principle of evolution and music,'' says Susumu Ohno, a geneticist at the Beckman Research Institute of The City of Hope in Duarte, Calif. And he has found a way to take advantage of it. He has squeezed Bach out of primordial slime and Chopin out of a mere mouse.

Each organism's genes are composed of strands of DNA, which in turn are made up of four nucleotides containing the bases adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. The order of bases is far from random. Indeed, within a gene, certain oligomers -- short chains of bases arranged in a set se- quence -- frequently recur.

This is hardly surprising, because recurrence is rampant in nature. Says Ohno, ''Evolution relies on gene duplication. In other words, changes in nature are variations on themes. ''All in all, truly new coding sequences occasionally generated by modern organisms recapitulate the first set of prebiotic coding sequences of eons ago,'' he wrote in a recent issue of the journal Chemica Scripta.

As for music, it's melodies repeating themselves and being interrupted by other melodies. Says Ohno, ''I was looking at sequences of bases, and it struck me that they might be like melodies.'' They are. Ohno says the ''principle of repetitious recurrence pervades both the construction of coding sequences in the genomes . . . and musical composition.''

When Ohno assigned notes to each of the four bases -- cytosine for do, adenine for re and mi, guanine for fa and sol, thymine for la and ti, and cytosine again for do, the genes made music. And that music wasn't just melodies repeating endlessly, because in genes, says Ohno, ''the monotony created by the endless recurrence of these decamers, hexamers, and their derivatives is broken by refreshing appearances of tandemly recurring base oligomers that are not directly related.''

Each gene has its own style. Old genes lend themselves to somewhat Baroque music, in which the repetitive sequences are quite pronounced. The music composed from a collagen gene, say, sounds like Bach. But more recent genes, says Ohno, ''are better suited for late Romantic music, in which the repetitive patterns are more cryptic'' and separated by longer intervals. For example, a section of the mouse gene for RNA polymerase II sounds like Chopin. Music from genes that encode cell adhesion molecules sounds like Debussy. And according to Ohno the sequence for human X-linked phosphoglycerate kinase, played on a violin, ''is hauntingly melancholy, as though reflecting the Weltschmerz of the gene that persevered for hundreds of millions of years.''

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