Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Show Me Your DNA And I'll Tell You Your Eye Color
More and more information is being gathered about how human genes influence medically relevant traits, such as the propensity to develop a certain disease. A group of researchers form the Netherlands put this goal to a test using eye colour. The group around Manfred Kayser of the Erasmus University Medical Center Rotterdam showed that it can be predicted with an accuracy of over 90% whether a person has blue or brown eyes by analysing DNA from only 6 different positions of the genome. Manfred Kayser and his colleagues analysed the DNA of over 6000 Dutch people whose eye colour had been scored. They determined the sequence at 37 SNPs in 8 eye colour genes for each of these and found that the eye colour of a given individual can be predicted with over 90% confidence already with the best 6 SNPs from 6 genes, as long as the persons's eyes are blue or brown. For the intermediate colour, shown by about 10% of the people tested, the accuracy is lower at about 75%. Also, the reliability of such DNA-based eye color prediction test currently depends on an accurate knowledge that the unknown person whose DNA was tested is of European descent, since the used SNPs are associated with eye color but have no direct functional implications as far as known. Inferring highly accurate information on European ancestry from a DNA sample is not trivial, although such research is underway as well. More and more information is being gathered about how human genes influence medically relevant traits, such as the propensity to develop a certain disease. The ultimate goal is to predict whether or not a given trait will develop later in life from the genome sequence alone (i.e. from the sequence of the bases that make up the DNA strands that store genetic information in every cell of the body).
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5 comments:
I thought this was a really interesting article about how DNA is related to eye color - something that I had no idea about. This was a very good choice for an article!
This article was very well done, and did a good job of explaining the detail of this new technology discovered by scientist at the Erasmus University Medical Center Rotterdam . Another thing that I thought was well presented was the way he mentioned the application of this technology to determine a persons eye color. The article thoroughly explains how DNA can be examined and with fairly good success a persons eye color can be predicted. Lastly, I liked the way the article was written, and organized. Some things that I might suggest to be improved, would be adding how this can aid in forensic investigations. I think that it is remarkable that DNA can be used to predict an actual physical characteristic like eye color. Overall this was a great review.
The aritcle was very intersting. Trent did a good explaining the article. It was really intresting learning how dna can related to eye color.
This was a very well written article. It more interesting than a lot of the articles that are posted. I think it is cool how there is a new forensics technique that allows you to determine somebody's eye color. I was also pretty surprised to see that they can come within ninety percent accuracy.
I really enjoyed reading this article and I though it was really well written. It had perfect detail explaining the new technology discovered by the scientist at Erasmus University Medical Center Rotterdam. I had no idea that DNA related to eye color like this article thoroughly explains.
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