Here's how genes determine your facial features

Your nose is most influenced by genes.

Takeaways

* New study reveals that more than 130 regions in human DNA play a role in 

sculpting facial features.

* The nose is the facial feature most influenced by our genes.

* Understanding the link between specific genes and facial features could be 

useful for treating facial defacement.

 

* We might think it’s rather evident that your facial appearance is set on by 

your genes. Just look in the family photo gallery and observe the same eyes 

or chin, nose, of your grandparent’s uncles aunts, and cousins . Perhaps you 

have seen or know someone with a genetic syndrome – that often results 

from a damaging alteration to one or more genes – and noticed the often 

distinctive facial features.

 *You may be wondered to learn that until very recently, geneticists had

virtually no understanding of which parts of our DNA were linked to even

the most basic aspects of facial appearance. This gap in our knowledge was

particularly maddening since facial appearance plays such an important role

in basic human interactions. The availability of large data sets combining

genetic information with facial images that can be measured has rapidly

advanced the speed of discovery.

How many genes are linked with facial appearance?

There is no complete answer to this question, but recent work published in

Nature Genetics by collaborative research team has identified more than 130

chromosomal regions linked with specific aspects of facial shape.

Acknowledge these regions is a critical first step to grasp how genetics

impacts our faces and how such knowledge could impact human health in

the future.

What do we know about these genes?

* When we look unitedly at the implicated genes at these 130-plus DNA

regions, some fascinating patterns emerged.

* Your nose, whether we like it or not, is the part of our face most determined

by our genes. Perhaps not surprisingly, areas like the cheeks, which are

highly affected by lifestyle factors like diet, showed the fewest genetic

associations.

*The ways that these genes guide facial shape was not at all invariable. Some

genes, we found, had highly restrained effects and effected very specific

parts of the face, while others had broad effects involving multiple parts.

* We also found that a large part of these genes are complex in basic

developmental processes that build our bodies – bone formation, for

example – and, in many cases, are the same genes that have been connected

in rare syndromes and facial abnormality like cleft palate.

* We found it compelling that there was a high degree of complication

between the genes involved in facial and limb development, which may give

an important hint as to why many genetic syndromes are distinguished by

both hand and facial miscreation’s. In another peculiar turn, we found some

proof that the genes involved in facial shape may also be tangled in cancer –

an interest in finding emerging evidence that individuals treated for pediatric

cancer show some distinctive facial features.

Can someone take my DNA and build a picture of my
face?

* It is unlikely that today, or for the anticipated future, someone could take a

sample of your DNA and use it for building an image of your face.

Predicting an individual’s facial appearance, like any complex genetic trait,

is a very hard task.

* To put that statement in context, the 130-plus genetic regions we identified

explain less than 10% of the changes in facial shape. However, even if we understand all of the genes involved in facial appearance, forecasting would

still be a dreadful challenge. This is because combination of traits like facial

shape are not directed by simply summing up the effects of group of

individual genes. Facial features are affected by many biological and non￾biological factors: trauma, disease, sun exposure, biomechanical forces and

surgery, age, diet, climate, hormones,

* All of these factors have contact with our genome in complex ways that we

have not even begun to understand. To add to this picture of complexity,

genes interact with one another; this is known as “epistasis,” and its effects

can be complicated and uncertain.

* It is not amazed then, that researchers aiming to foresee individual facial

features from DNA have been in vain. This is not to say that such foretelling

will never be possible, but if someone is telling you that they can do this

today, you should be highly doubtful

-Deepika P