Height may be in your genes, but it will be hard to find them all, researchers say

It should surprise no one that height is genetic. For instance, consider that 7-foot-6 NBA star Yao Ming’s parents are 6-foot-7 and 6-foot-3.

But for anyone hoping to find the “tall gene” that might give them a few extra inches, researchers have some disheartening news: A comprehensive search for places in the genome that could be associated with height yielded only 180 spots that appear to be associated with height. That might sound like a lot, but the researchers estimate they account for only about 11% of the variability in adult height.

What exactly do they mean by comprehensive? They scoured the DNA of more than 180,000 people, checking nearly 3 million letters in each of their genomes. By looking for correlations between those letters and those people’s height, they identified 180 letters (their official name is single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs).

Based on their results, the researchers estimate that at most, there are enough such SNPs to account for about 16% of the variation in height.

Still, scientists think more than 80% of height is determined by DNA (with the rest controlled by nutrition and environmental factors). It appears that most of the height genes will remain a mystery.

The findings were published this week in the journal Nature.

-- Karen Kaplan/Los Angeles Times