Epigenetic heredity of human height.

ABSTRACT: Genome-wide SNP analyses have identified genomic variants associated with adult human height. However, these only explain a fraction of human height variation, suggesting that significant information might have been systematically missed by SNP sequencing analysis. A candidate for such non-SNP-linked information is DNA methylation. Regulation by DNA methylation requires the presence of CpG islands in the promoter region of candidate genes. Seventy two of 87 (82.8%), height-associated genes were indeed found to contain CpG islands upstream of the transcription start site (USC CpG island searcher; validation: UCSC Genome Browser), which were shown to correlate with gene regulation. Consistent with this, DNA hypermethylation modules were detected in 42 height-associated genes, versus 1.5% of

SUBMITTER: Simeone P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4208652 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature