Sketch of DNA analysis
Five genes of facial features have been found
Biologists have identified five genes whose variants determine a person's facial features. The work was published in the journal PLoS Genetics (Liu et al., A Genome-Wide Association Study Identifies Five Loci Influencing Facial Morphology in Europeans), its summary is given by ScienceNOW: Five Genes Help Form a Face.
About 10 thousand volunteers of European origin took part in the experiment. Each of them underwent an MRI scan and provided samples of their DNA.
Based on the obtained tomographic images, scientists determined the spatial relationships between the "anchor" points on the face. A total of nine such parameters were analyzed. Among them were the distance between the pupils, the length of the nose and, for example, the distance between the wings of the nose.
Anchor physiognomic points on a two-dimensional image.
Image from an article by Fan Liu et al., 2012
The heredity of the volunteers was examined using DNA microchips. They do not determine the complete sequence of the genome, but only some known variants (polymorphisms, SNPs) that differ in the DNA sequence in different individuals. The scientists compared the data on heredity with the parameters of facial features and looked for correlations between them.
Thus, it was possible to find five genes that affect the appearance of a person – PRDM16, PAX3, TP63, C5orf50, and COL17A1. For one of them, PAX3, has previously shown an effect on the shape of the face in children. The other two were previously defined as genes in which mutations are associated with developmental abnormalities, for example, cleft lip.
Another, perhaps even more important result of the work is a general view of the relationship between human DNA and its appearance. The authors statistically confirmed the opinion that appearance is determined by the combined action of hundreds, if not thousands of individual genes. The influence of each of them, although statistically significant, is quite small.
So far, it is impossible to solve the inverse problem – to reproduce a face from a DNA sequence based on the detected five genes. Nevertheless, the researchers emphasize, in the future it will become quite simple. Such a task is often faced by criminologists. There are already all the technologies necessary to solve it – from the isolation of microscopic amounts of DNA (for example, just from the air of a room where a person was) before computer modeling of the face. All that is required to solve the inverse problem is to expand the scale of studies similar to those conducted by the authors.
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14.09.2012