Musical gene sets birds singing

THE DISCOVERY that bird brains
call appreciate the finer nuances of
music has a learn of scientists harmonising at Rockefeller University in New
York. The scientists, led 13, Claudio Mello, have identified a Aile in song-
birds that responds to music made by
other birds.

Scientists studying canaries and
zebra finches discovered that those
nerve cells in the avian brain that react
to Sound are influenced by a gone, to
which they have given an unmusical
acronvin ZENK. The gone reacts most
vigorously when a male songbird hears
the song of another male of its own
species, less enthusiastically when the
'trilling is by another species and quite
indifferently when the music is not by
birds. Activation of the gene is said by
the scientists to be an early development in the evolution of permanent
memory in birds. Tile Rockefeller
study, reported in the Proceedinqs of
the Notional Academy of Sciences, is
the first attempt to identify the work of
individual genes in brain centres. The
team chose to Oudy ZENK because it
had earlier found that the gone
responds to changes in stimulation.

In conducting their study, the
Ruckpfefler researchers isolated 24
adult male canaries and zebra finches
in individual boxes for 24 hours. Each
bird was then exposed for 45 minutes
either to tape recordings of songs of its
own species, songs of other species or
simple, non-avian terms. The birds
were then killed and their brains were
studied with radioactive probes.