Friday, April 26, 2019

The Mystery of Height

In an article from The International Journal of Science, Nature, suggests that ones gene for height has long been hidden until now.  The gene for height has long since plagued geneticists causing them to question everything we know about genetics because theories were not linking to discovery at all.  In order to find the gene scientists turned to Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) in order to scour a larger variety of SNPs.  A team led by Peter Visscher performed a complete readout of 6 million bases out of 21,620 people and were able to find genetic differences in 1 out of 500 people determining that height is 79% hereditary.


I think this article is very interesting being that we are still uncertain the full extent of genetics based height.  I am interested to see as the studies continue if we can find an isolated gene that will be able to determine height.  Height is a bit of an interesting study in my family being that none of us are relatively similar heights.

3 comments:

  1. Height is interesting because its genetic background is not fully known. I personally think that it is genetic. For example, in my family for the most part is more on the short side. My great grandparents weren't tall, causing my grandparents not to be as tall either, or my parents and siblings.

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  2. Height being 79% hereditary make sense to me. I am eager to see if and when scientist isolate one or a group of genes determining height. As it is quantitative genetic characteristic, the individual's variation in genotype and environment contribute differently to the phenotype. The genotype will set limitations or in other words will determine the extend to which one can grow tall, but if the environment is not nourishing that individual will not get to his full potential for hight.

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  3. I find this interesting as my moms side is all relatively short and my dads side is all relatively tall. My moms mom is short, leading to my mom and aunt being short and then I, also, am on the shorter side. My dads dad is taller, leading to my dad and uncles being taller. It is cool to see how it correlates to genetics.

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