Some genes that help shape your face also help shape your brain

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2021-04-06 01:00

Australia; International; VIC

Human-brain By Hugh Guiney, CC BY-SA 3.0

International scientists, including an Australian, say they've identified 76 areas of DNA that help determine the shape of your face, and the shape of your brain. They say their results suggest that early in development, the face and brain mutually shape each other through structural effects and signalling between cells. But these DNA regions do not appear to have an effect on behaviour or thinking ability, they say.

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Journal/
conference: Nature Genetics

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: Murdoch Children's Research Institute (MCRI), Stanford University, USA

Funder: J.W. was supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a Lorry Lokey endowed professorship and a Stinehart Reed award. S.N. was supported by a Helen Hay Whitney Fellowship. The KU Leuven research team and analyses were supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH; 1-R01-DE027023 and 2-R01-DE027023), The Research Fund KU Leuven (BOF-C1, C14/15/081 and C14/20/081) and The Research Program of the Research Foundation in Flanders (FWO; G078518N). The computational resources and services used in this work were provided by the VSC (Flemish Supercomputer Center), funded by the FWO and the Flemish Government (department EWI). J.P.S. was supported by an NIH training grant (5T32HG000044-23). J.K.P. was supported by the NIH (HG008140 and HG009431). Pittsburgh personnel, data collection and analyses were supported by the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (U01-DE020078, R01-DE016148 and R01-DE027023). Funding for genotyping by the National Human Genome Research Institute (X01-HG007821 and X01-HG007485) and funding for initial genomic data cleaning by the University of Washington were provided by contract HHSN268201200008I from the National Institute for Dental and Craniofacial Research awarded to the Center for Inherited Disease Research (https://www.cidr.jhmi.edu/). J.T. was supported by the NIH (5R01-DA033431-07) and the National Science Foundation (1922598).

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