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Scientists Stack Up New Genes For Height
An anonymous reader writes "An international team of researchers, including a number from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill schools of medicine and public health, have discovered hundreds of genes that influence human height. Their findings confirm that the combination of a large number of genes in any given individual, rather than a simple 'tall' gene or 'short' gene, helps to determine a person's stature. It also points the way to future studies exploring how these genes combine into biological pathways to impact human growth."
"The consortium, aptly named GIANT for Genetic Investigation of ANthropometric Traits."
-_-
I'll bet the first use of this information will be for herbal v14gr4 advertisements.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I should really be worried about Gattacaish stuff instead of looking forward to gene therapies to cure us 5'6"ers of our affliction; women in clubs and bars don't look for a sense scientific morality though.
Is there any evidence of epigenetic factors, like mother's or father's diet before or during gestation, that influence height? Can you eat different for taller children?
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make install -not war
I don't see the GATTACA connection here, other than a knee-jerk response to any DNA discoveries. There are easier ways to determine (with high confidence, though not certainty) whether someone has genes encoding for being tall. A measuring tape, for instance.
Only a little? I think it's a promising field but I'm all out terrified about what they'll cook up.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Considering that a human's height is derived primarily from there bone dimensions (at least, I think that's the case), this would make sense. Frankly I would have been more surprised to find out that there was one master 'bone gene' that proportionally scaled all bone structures in the body.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
..."genes to control human flight" and get really excited for a second?
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Rarrr. Rarr-rarr, moo rarr.
so.. howcome you didn't sue Lucas for using your image in those godawful prequels? :)
You were pretty cool when Elmore drew you, but why'd you let Lucas turn you into an idiot with a jamaican accent?
Took me a bit of time to find, but here's the link to the actual research paper (requires nature subscription):
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature09410.html
From the abstract:
Our data explain approximately 10% of the phenotypic variation in height, and we estimate that unidentified common variants of similar effect sizes would increase this figure to approximately 16% of phenotypic variation (approximately 20% of heritable variation)
The introduction of the paper states that "80% of the variation [for height] within a given population is estimated to be attributable to additive genetic factors, but over 40 previously published variants explain less than 5% of the variance." While this paper pushes that to 16%, it's nowhere near the limit of what can be detected.
I find it interesting that they've got a sample size of around 100,000 individuals for this study (actually a meta-analysis of summary statistics from 46 GWAS of 133,653 individuals), but still claim a need for more individuals. I suspect that'll still be said when a study is done on 10 million individuals, or a billion.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
While I have no doubt it's true that a large number of genes contribute to height, it's very likely there are a handful of genes that have a significantly larger effect than the rest. It's a simple matter of statistics. If you have 100 genes that all have, more or less, the same small contribution, then there would be exceedingly few people who were over 6' and the distribution of heights would be most people very close to the same height and only a handful of outliers. You also wouldn't have unusual heights being very heritable (which they are). There must be just a few genes that have a much more significant effect than others.
As far as I know, there are no single genes for general traits like height, intelligence, race, etc. Claiming that one exists is a new form of logical fallacy, named after one of the most egregious abusers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewontin's_Fallacy
Now if we can just train our media to stop talking about "the height gene" or "the nine inch penis gene" we'll have it made.
Futurist Traditionalism
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/63859/title/A_thousand_points_of_height
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
It's good to know that science can definitively prove why I'm a freak. Father - 6'0", Mother - 6'0", Me - 6'10"...
Then there's the utility meter reader or (in Yank parlance) the cable guy.
Actually one thing I did notice at high school was that it seemed virtually all the tall kids were gluttonous milk drinkers.
All very interesting, but will it help tackle height discrimination? There is now plenty of evidence that people are treated differently on the grounds of stature, and in many different and often profound ways.
Obviously people are of different heights, but what matters is that we live in a society where it simply doesn't affect the way you're treated.
The reason that people are paying attention to hight is, in part, that it's a simply measured complex trait. Every study of human genetics under the sun collects basic anthropometrics, and so it's relatively easy to lump everyone together in an effort to increase the power to detect genetic variation that influences height. I think the real interesting part here is that even after collecting a hundred thousand data points, the obvious data analysis methods can account for a relatively low proportion of the total variance in height. That has consequences for studies of other disease traits with complex genetic architecture like diabetes or schizophrenia, which have often have study sizes one or two orders of magnitude lower than this one. In the not so recent past, influential members of the scientific community have suggested that big studies of complex traits in humans might have a profound impact on bedside medical decisions. It's going to take a bit longer than they anticipated. To our collective dismay, biology is still complicated.