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If I ate an Inuit diet, extremely low in plants and high in fats from oily fish and blubbery mammals, my blood vessels would soon be screaming out for mercy. The Inuit themselves have no such problem. They have long since adapted to their distinctive diet, and have several unusually common variants in genes that metabolize fatty acids. And Rasmus Nielsen from the University of California, Berkeley, who identified these variants, showed that they also strongly influence height and weight, not just in the Inuit, but in Europeans too.
Nielsen’s study was notable not just for its results, but for the vanishingly small number of people it took to get those results. Height, weight, and other traits like intelligence and schizophrenia risk are influenced by hundreds or thousands of genetic variants, each of which only has a small effect. In the early years of human genetics, when researchers searched for these variants by running small studies, they ended up with reams of unreliable results. So, studies got bigger and more collaborative.
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The field of genetics needs more studies like this. Humanity isn’t just restricted to the cities of Europe, North America and East Asia, where most participants in genetic studies hail from. We are a species of extremes. And by looking at the genomes of people who live in extreme environments, we stand a better chance of finding genetic variants that are broadly relevant to human health.
Read full, original post: How People Living At Earth’s Extremes Reveal the Genome’s Best Tricks
