Studies found that specific genes determine height of people

Studies found that specific genes determine height of people

Researchers from Children’s Hospital Boston have found the reasons behind lack of height in among people. According to their calculations, there are specific genes in the DNA, which are
responsible for lack or abundance of height. The researchers found that these particular gene characteristics can cause 10 percent of height difference among people.  

Height is largely passed down through families but shorter people can put the blame of their lack of height on the shortage of these especial genes. The researchers believe that missing
copies of genes or other sections of DNA could create up to half of the genetic impact on our height.

Copy number variants (CNV), genetic abnormalities, are the changes within the chromosome. It means either a cell has too many or too few copies of a slice of DNA, the acid which contains
our genetic code. Some of these CNVs are common but others only occur in a small number of people.

The researchers revealed that the people with more unusual CNV deletions, missing of a genome part, have a potential to be shorter in height. Everyone has some of these deletions in their
genome; some have thousands of individual components of DNA, while some have several million.

The researchers from Children’s Hospital Boston conducted two studies on 12,000 people and concluded that people lose one eighth of an inch in height for every million individual deletions.

The study was led by Dr Joel Hirschhorn and was published in the American Journal of Human Genetics. Hirschhorn said that it showed a small but firm link between the amount of genetic
material missing and a decrease in height. This trend stood up regardless of which genes were missing.

He further added, “Each deletion takes out some letters of the DNA sequence – most have no effect but some have a modest effect. With both areas that have an effect on height and those
that do not, we found a small relationship between deletions and short stature.”

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Posted by Zeeshan Gohar on Nov 29 2011. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry