All the Genes That Make You Tall or Not

Even though both my parents were relatively short, I'm above average. Scientists have long thought that height wasn't determined by just one gene and now we know it's over 12,000.

Thanks to a massive new genetic study, we now know those genes affecting height are scattered over twenty percent of the human genome.

To date, the largest genome study of height used DNA information from 700,000 people. The larger the sample size, the more likely it is that all genes involved in a trait will be identified.

It is also important to include information about people other than those of Northern European ancestry on whom most of these genome studies are based.

The latest study was done by international teams of scientists involving a massive dataset of over 5 million people over twenty years. But even this study had the same limitations. Only one million samples came from people in Africa, Asia and South America.

So, while the results will be accurate for Europeans, we'll need a lot more data to develop accurate genetic height predictions for other groups of people.

This study found that the 12,000 genetic variants involved in a person's height are distributed over seven thousand chromosomal locations.

They were clustered near genes that had been associated with genetic disorders of skeletal growth. In the future, this information could be used generate a score to predict height and be a part of yearly child physicals.

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