FT Wrote:
Cap'n Squirrgle Wrote:
FT in 3...2...1...
Thanks, British researchers, for finding this out 20 years too late! Fuckin' limeys...
This is from today's issue of
Science:
Quote:
The U.K. team first found the gene in type 2 diabetes patients participating in a multi-disease study sponsored by the Wellcome Trust, the U.K. biomedical charity. Timothy Frayling in Hattersley's lab and his co-workers first analyzed the genomes of 1924 diabetic and 2938 nondiabetic individuals, looking for which of nearly 500,000 genetic markers were more common in those with diabetes. Those markers helped them home in on a variant, called a single-nucleotide polymorphism, in the FTO gene. The gene, located on chromosome 16, was a surprise: Whereas other known diabetes genes predominantly control insulin production, FTO proved to be associated with body mass index, or BMI (weight divided by height squared)--suggesting that it might control weight in more than just people with diabetes.
To find out, 41 collaborators looked for the FTO mutation in DNA samples from "literally every single study we could," says Hattersley, including another two diabetes populations, nine cohorts of white European adults, and two studies of European children. In every one, the FTO mutation was associated with BMI. Overall, about 16% of white adults and children carry two copies of this variant. They are 1.67 times more likely than those lacking any copies to be obese, the group reports.
The researchers don't know what FTO does. But because FTO may lead to a new pathway for controlling weight, "we'll have people racing to understand" the gene's function, says obesity researcher Jeffrey Flier of Harvard Medical School in Boston. Those studies should help unravel the basic biology of obesity.
