An NYU professor has a new finding about what may cause certain genetic traits, like height and eye color, to vary more than others: its location.
NYU assistant professor and biologist Matthew Rockman found that the location of a certain trait on the chromosome makes the trait more or less susceptible to mutation and evolution.
Rockman worked alongside Princeton University’s Leonid Kruglyak and Sonja S. Skrovanek from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
“The key conclusion is that in the species of nematode worms we studied, how much a trait varies between individuals is more strongly influenced by the genomic location of the genes that influence the trait than by any properties of the trait itself,” Kruglyak said. “This is due to the fact that genes travel together on chromosomes, and natural selection acting on genes that happen to lie near the genes influencing the trait can override trait-specific forces.”
The three biologists studied a species of worm called Caenorhabditis elegans, and found that genes located the middle of a chromosome are less likely to contribute to genetic change in an organism. Because these vital genes are in the middle of the chromosome, the biologists used mathematics to determine that genes in the center are more closely related to their surrounding genes than those on the ends, and therefore do not undergo as many changes.
Read the full story at the Washington Square News.
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