BlogIssues

Being told “you’re just like your mum/dad” is quite annoying sometimes, but somewhat true. While I always believed that you do inherit some genetic material from both your parents, your environment and upbringing also play a significant role, if not a more important role than your genetic inheritance.

There’s new research:

It had been thought that there are only a handful of situations in which just one of a pair of gene copies is used. But a new screen of 4,000 human genes has uncovered 371 that sometimes play favourites, suggesting that this phenomenon is far more pervasive than had been thought.

“What we’ve shown violates general rules about what we think about genes: if a gene is turned on you express both the maternal and paternal copy,” says Andrew Chess, a biologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the study along with colleague Alexander Gimelbrant.

When only mum or dad matters [Nature News]