Your city can influence your genes
By ANITuesday, December 8, 2009
MELBOURNE - Living in a city can influence the expression of your genes.
The study, conducted by geneticist and supervising author Dr Greg Gibson of Georgia Tech in the US, has been published in today’s edition of Nature Genetics.
To reach the conclusion, Gibson and colleagues recruited 200 Moroccan individuals from two ethnic groups - Arab and Berber.
“The Amazigh Berbers are descendants of the first modern humans who populated north Africa 35,000 years ago. The Arabs moved into southern Morocco between the 7th and 11th centuries,” write the authors.
Gibson says many of the Amazigh and Arabic people in Morocco live in villages, but some have relocated to cities.
According to Gibson, the research’s aim was to examine both populations and determine the effect of “nature, nuture and culture on human physiology”, reports ABC Science.
He says the environment includes “the complex mix of what you eat, how stressed you are and where you live”.
For the study, blood samples were taken from individuals living in both the city and villages.
Overall the study found “gene expression differed between the two locations in up to a third of all transcripts”. (ANI)
