The search for genetic height markers for forensic purposes

摘要: Much ef fort in the field of fo ren sic ge net ics in the fu ture will un doubt edly be de voted to pre dict ing phys i cal char ac ter is tics. Signif i cant prog ress to wards fo ren sic pig men ta tion pre dic tion has been made re cently and thus it is also in ter est ing to en quire about the pros pects for height pre dic tion. Height is one of the most vis i ble traits ob served by wit nesses, be ing a com plex quan ti ta tive trait with strong heritability rang ing ac cord ing to var i ous stud ies from 70 to 90%. Sci en tists have al ready searched for genes that ac count for nor mal vari a tion of height in hu man pop u la tions. They have found sev eral can di date genes, such as ESR, CYP-19 and VDR, thanks to ob served mu ta tions that cause rare patho log i cal stat ure syn dromes. It has been ar gued that the most prom is ing approach to de tect ing com mon al leles with only a mod est im pact on the phe no type is large ge nome-wide as so ci a tion stud ies. Indeed, this pow er ful method has led to iden ti fi ca tion of many genes sig nif i cantly as so ci ated with hu man adult height, in clud ing HMGA2, GDF5-UQCC, ZBTB38 and HHIP. In ad di tion, these find ings have been con firmed in sev eral in de pend ent stud ies. It has been dem on strated that the dis cov ered vari a tion ex plains only a small frac tion of the over all vari a tion in height. Re search results sug gest that there are great num ber of ad di tive ge netic vari ants with small ef fect size that in flu ence height in the gen eral popu la tion. Fur ther more, it seems that as so ci a tion stud ies for height should take into ac count dif fer ences in ge netic vari a tion not only within a pop u la tion, but also be tween pop u …