Ever wonder how much of your height you inherited from your parents?
A large-scale genetic study published recently in the journal Nature is helping shed some light on the factors that determine whether a person grows to be 6-feet-1 or 5-feet-2.
While scientists already had a good idea of the most common genetic factors that contribute to height, the new findings uncover a number of rare genetic alterations that can play a surprisingly major role in human growth.
Using data from the Genetic Investigation of Anthropometric Traits consortium (a group also known as GIANT), scientists from the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard analyzed genetic information from more than 700,000 people, discovering 83 DNA changes that play a part in determining a person’s height.