Healing Music Enterprises Blog

Sci­en­tists say they’ve found ap­prox­i­mate loca­t­ions in our ge­nome where genes af­fect­ing mu­si­cal tal­ent may lie, the re­sults of the first, small study to sys­tem­at­ic­ally seek these out.

As part of the re­search, each par­ti­ci­pant al­so took three tests of mu­si­cal ap­ti­tude.

The re­search­ers re­ported find­ing “sig­nif­i­cant ev­i­dence” for an as­socia­t­ion be­tween that abil­ity and a small re­gion of Chro­mo­some 4. Hu­man genes lie on about two doz­en dis­tinct chro­mo­somes, most num­bered by size from big­gest to small­est.

The patch of DNA in ques­tion en­com­passed about 50 genes, Pul­li and col­leagues wrote. Of par­tic­u­lar in­ter­est with­in these, they added, was one known as netrin re­cep­tor UNC5C pre­cur­sor. This gene, they wrote, in­ter­acts with mo­le­cules that gov­ern the de­vel­op­ment of brain cells and their intercon­nec­tions. Mu­ta­tions in the gene are al­so in­di­rectly linked to de­fects in time and pitch pro­cess­ing, they added.

There’s al­so ev­i­dence such mutations may be con­nect­ed to the lan­guage dys­func­tion dys­lex­ia, sug­gest­ing pos­si­ble con­nec­tions be­tween mu­sic and lan­guage, the team pro­posed. In­ter­est­ing­ly, they added, of the three mu­si­cal tests they used, the one with the strongest ap­par­ent link to the gene re­gion is al­so pre­dic­tive of dys­lex­ia, which im­pairs read­ing and spell­ing abil­ity.

The team al­so re­ported two oth­er snip­pets of the ge­nome pos­sibly but more weakly linked to mu­si­cal ap­ti­tude, on Chro­mo­somes 8 and 18—the lat­ter at a re­gion al­so linked to dys­lex­ia.

In find­ings that ech­oed Pul­li’s some­what, a sep­a­rate group re­ported in the April 16 ad­vance on­line is­sue of the Jour­nal of Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­sci­ence that chil­dren with lan­guage syn­tax deficits al­so have mu­si­cal dif­fi­cul­ties .

Sci­en­tists have long sus­pected mu­sic might have ge­net­ic roots. “Mu­sic is an an­cient and un­iver­sal fea­ture across all hu­man so­ci­eties,” not­ed Pul­li and col­leagues. The not-un­com­mon ap­pear­ance of fam­i­lies of mu­si­cians, such as the clan that fa­mously spawned J.S. Bach in 1685, al­so sug­gest a ge­net­ic basis, the re­search­ers added—though oth­er fac­tors could ex­plain that phe­nom­e­non.