Drawing your portrait using your DNA

"You look just like your mother."

"Easy to pick out a Smith kid."

It's common knowledge that our looks are inherited. But just which genes make the face? Those pieces of the puzzle are now being picked out of the pile. Well, five of them at least. Researchers at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam conducted a study using head magnetic resonance imaging and portrait photographs to map the face. Then they sifted through each individual's genome to find genes that seemed associated with the facial landmarks. Three of the genes, called PRDM16, PAX3 and TP63, had already been identified in other studies. Two, C5orf50 and COL17A1, were previously unknown.

There are a couple of interesting things here. First, these genes code for other things, not just facial characteristics. PAX3 is a gene that regulates muscle-cell formation, and it also controls the distance between the top of the nose and the right and left eyes.

Second, PAX3 had been identified in a previous study (by Lavinia Paternoster in research that was part of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children) that used different methods. This is a classic and strong example of replicating results.

We aren't quite able to have a computer draw a picture of a face using a the DNA from a swab of the cheek. There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of genes which give us the faces we so identify ourselves with. But we are getting closer.
  



For more details check out the article at NBC science.

Spring caught up with me! It was gardening time, and extra things at school time, and yet another spring bug that hit our family. If you want to read about my gardening, I'm talking about it at my main blog, which right now is only slightly more active than this one. And then came the need to hunker down and get organized. I'm a mom, wife, writer, active volunteer, and church goer. I also knit and garden. And cook my dinners from scratch. If I'm going to keep hold of this rope, I need to make sure the ends don't fray. So I purposefully set the summer to get things under control. And I was pretty successful at it. More of that is on my other blog too.

But now, it's fall. So here is a cool link.



The Human Genome is Far More Complex than Scientist Thought

We already knew that epigenetics was big, but we didn't know it was this big. Around 80% of what we thought of as "junk DNA" is biochemically active. In this active section, there are 70,000 sites which control whether or not nearby genes are activated and over 400,000 sites which influence the activity of genes. And there are only about 20,000 protein encoding genes. Makes you think, doesn't it? Read the article, and then link through to Not Exactly Rocket Science to learn even more.

Also, that image is totally computer generated. DNA does not look like that under an electron microscope. Even if we could actually see it that close up, it would look much lumpier and wouldn't be that regular it all. It would be bunched up or stretched out, bulged out, and sometimes split apart.