{"id":46196,"date":"2011-10-02T20:34:50","date_gmt":"2011-10-03T04:34:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=14061"},"modified":"2011-10-02T20:34:50","modified_gmt":"2011-10-03T04:34:50","slug":"the-genetics-of-hair-texture-a-mystery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2011\/10\/02\/the-genetics-of-hair-texture-a-mystery\/","title":{"rendered":"The genetics of hair texture: a mystery"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/files\/2011\/10\/580px-LaurynHill_cropped.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/files\/2011\/10\/580px-LaurynHill_cropped.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"580px-LaurynHill_cropped\" width=\"580\" height=\"600\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-14062\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Lauryn Hill, <i><b>Image credit:<\/b> <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File%3ALaurynHill_cropped.jpg\">Lisa Lang<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n<hr\/>\n<p>I received an email today from a friend about speculation on the genetics of hair texture. More specifically, curly vs. straight hair. I know that there are a few SNPs which are correlated with straight vs. curly hair (23andMe has actually been involved in this), but the architecture hasn&#8217;t been elucidated to nearly the same extent as pigmentation. The hair form markers explain ~5% of the population level variation. In contrast variants at large effect pigmentation genes can explain ~30% of population level variation.<\/p>\n<p>So I did what I often do: check Wikipedia. Wikipedia might not be right much of the time, but it&#8217;s a great place to start looking for sources and get a sense of the range of disagreement. <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hair#Texture\">What I found was not pretty<\/a>. Basically there&#8217;s not much there, and I was tempted to delete the whole section. The evolutionary explanations for why some populations have curly (or woolly) or straight hair are particularly embarrassing. But honestly I can&#8217;t think of anything that&#8217;s not laughable. Can you?<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/GeneExpressionBlog\/~4\/bZXVYEs_YkA\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lauryn Hill, Image credit: Lisa Lang I received an email today from a friend about speculation on the genetics of hair texture. More specifically, curly vs. straight hair. I know that there are a few SNPs which are correlated with straight vs. curly hair (23andMe has actually been involved in this), but the architecture hasn&#8217;t [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,82,1734,481,525],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-genetics","category-genomics","category-hair-form","category-human-genetics","category-human-genomics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46196"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46876,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46196\/revisions\/46876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}