British researchers say they hope to uncover new treatments for growth disorders after reporting 83 genetic variants linked to human height.
The researchers say the new variants have a significant influence on height – affecting it by up to 2 cm.
This means the new genes have a greater influence on height than hundreds of variants previously reported as affecting height.
The study, reported in Nature last night, involved two British universities and the Montreal Heart Institute, Canada, together with Aarhus University, Denmark.
DNA came from 700,000 volunteers from across the world.
Two changes were found in the STC2 gene – affecting about 0.1% of the population and making them between one and two centimetres taller.
The Danish research showed these changes influence growth factors in the blood – suggesting possible treatments for growth failure.
Researcher Professor Panos Deloukas, of Queen Mary, University of London, UK, said: “The new genetic variants we found are rare in the population but their large effects on human height have revealed important new insights into human skeletal growth. The identified genes will be helpful in predicting a person’s risk of developing certain growth disorders.
"There is also the hope that we may one day be able to use this knowledge to develop a precision medicine approach for dealing with growth disorders.”
Fellow researcher Dr Andrew Wood, from Exeter University, UK, said: “Our latest discovery means that we can now explain over a quarter of the heritable factors involved in influencing a person’s height.
"How the body grows from a 40-50 cm baby into a perfectly proportioned adult three to four times the size, and how this occurs such that some of us end up being over half a metre taller than others, is a fascinating but poorly understood aspect of biology.”
Marouli et al. Rare and low-frequency coding variants alter human adult height. Nature 1 February 2017; doi: 10.1038/nature21039. [abstract]
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