Upset because you are too short or too tall? An international DNA scan shows it may not be as easy as blaming a parent for passing along the wrong gene. The researchers identified more than 100 different genes related to height, and said this likely accounted for about 20 percent of all the genes involved. The finding, published in the journal Nature, shows the trait may be even more complex than anyone thought. "Height clearly has a lot to do with genetics -- shorter parents tend to have shorter children, and taller parents tend to have taller children," Reuters quoted Dr. Joel Hirschhorn of Children's Hospital Boston, who worked on the study, as saying in a statement. "This paper is the biggest step forward to date in understanding which of the genetic variants that differ between people account for our differences in height." Nearly 300 researchers from 100 different institutions pooled their resources for the study, which looked at the genes of 180,000 people. "These investigators had once been competing with each other to find height genes, but then realized that the next step was to combine their samples and see what else could be found," said Karen Mohlke of the University of North Carolina, who worked on the study. "The competitors became collaborators to achieve a common scientific goal." The team looked at the entire genetic map, a scientific fishing expedition called a genome wide association study. While they found some genes in surprising areas, many clustered in expected places such as genetic regions linked with skeletal growth defects. About 80 genes had been linked to height before. "We have identified more than 100 novel loci (gene locations) that influence the classic polygenic trait of normal variation in human height, bringing the total to 180," the researchers wrote. The consortium has nicknamed itself GIANT for Genetic Investigation of Anthropometric Traits.
