During the late Renaissance, the Baroque, and the Classical Era, Newton’s laws – the concept of order underlying the universe—held sway. Music, especially in the Baroque era, mirrored this idea of the universe as orderly. The 20th century saw the rise of quantum mechanics and special and general relativity as theories, which modified Newton’s laws of motion. Quantum mechanics was built on essentially a single observation—the inability of light waves to follow Newton’s laws. 20th century music reflected this new, quantum reality (and the concept that under Newtonian order lay quantum randomness) with the suspension of the harmonic system that had been in place for centuries in favor of new experimental forms like 12-tone music, minimalism, and the music (or in some cases non-music) of John Cage. Music exploded into many different forms and genres—jazz, blues, rock, country hip-hop, etc.

And now we come to the 21st century, the genetic age where we have a working draft of the human genome and exponentially advancing DNA sequencing technology. What will be the type of music that will typify our age? Stay tuned to www.geneticmusicproject.com to find out…

Thanks to Professor Robert Greenberg’s “How to Listen to and Understand Great Music” from the Teaching Company for some of the concepts discussed in this blog post.

The DNA helix is represented by the circle of fifths. One strand is played by the right hand piano and the other strand by the left hand. The two strands are separated by a tritone (i.e. a minor fifth), which exactly splits the octave. The strands are also offset by half a beat, to better represent the true structure of the double helix.
This theme, representing the double-stranded helix of DNA, repeats several times for the first 30 seconds or so of the piece. Then the upper strand of DNA is damaged by the oxidative effects of free radicals (represented by staccato and dotted notes, note that this is similar to representation of the free radical with a dot, i.e. .OH as hydroxyl radical).

If a DNA base is damaged, the repair reaction is initiated by a glycosylase (represented by a descending chromatic scale, or sort of a glissando—glissando/glycosylase). If the sugar phosphate backbone is damaged, the endonuclease IV enzyme comes in and fixes it. Endo IV also fixes the apurinic/apyrimidinic site left by action of the glycosylase. Endo IV is represented by a series of “fourths”, followed by the quick removal of the damage (a quickly ascending series of notes). Finally, DNA polymerase I comes in and adds back the missing nucleotides, and the DNA strand is repaired.

For more details on this enzyme, search PubMed for “Levin” and “Demple” and you will find four papers (in Journal of Biological Chemistry and Nucleic Acids Research) that Bruce Demple and I published on this enzyme between 1988 and 1996.

DISCLAIMER: In my current day job, I am a regulatory scientist with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The opinions expressed on this post, as well as my activities on this site, are solely mine as a private citizen and should not be taken as agency policy or be a reflection on my employer (i.e. the U.S. taxpayer).

DNA Repair by Endonuclease IV (3).mp3 (1 MB)

Schizophrenia in a Box