Thursday, December 09, 2010
Two NGI centres, the Centre for Medical Systems Biology and the Netherlands Consortium for Healthy Ageing contributed to a landmark paper in Nature about height genes.
Scientists from both centres participate in the GIANT consortium.
Of particular interest was that some of the loci contained sets of genes known to be involved in growth-related processes, and a number of the loci overlapped with those previously linked to other traits and diseases, including bone mineral density, rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes, psoriasis and obesity.
First author of the paper, Karol Estrada: 'This gigantic study identified by far the largest number of genetic variants convincingly associated to a human trait. Beyond the large number of newly discovered genetic variants, the greatest leap forward is made towards the understanding of the biological processes controlling human height variation.'
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