Why Peruvians are among the world's shortest people

摘要

Nearly 4,000 common variations in DNA are known to affect height, with each one nudging stature up or down a millimeter or so. But a gene variant found in almost 5 percent of Peruvians reduces height by 2.2 centimeters on average. That's the biggest effect on stature recorded to date for a common version of a gene. People who carry two copies of the variant - one from each parent - are, on average, about 4.4 centimeters shorter than the average height of people who don't carry the variant, researchers report online May 13 in Nature.