Rare variants alter human height by up to 2cm

Our group contributed to a large international study published on 1 February in Nature, where over 300 scientists from across the globe have combined their effort to study in more than 700,000 participants what makes us shorter or taller. Adult height is mostly determined by the information encoded in our DNA: children from tall parents tend to be taller, and vice versa. “The idea is that if we can understand the genetics of a simple human trait like height, we could then apply this knowledge to develop tools to predict more complex human diseases such as diabetes or schizophrenia”, explains Zoltán Kutalik, SIB group leader and assistant professor at the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine of the Lausanne University Hospital.

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