Esiste una spiegazione scientifica per gli occhi azzurri? Secondo una recente ricerca pubblicata sul Daily Mail e condotta da scienzati dell’Università di Copenhagen (dove avere gli occhi chiari non è certo una rarità), il colore azzurro degli occhi deriva da una mutazione genetica che risale a circa 10000 anni fa. Lo studio, pubblicato sul periodico Human Genetics, dimostra il verificarsi di una singola mutazione in un gene chiamato OCA2. La mutazione sarebbe avvenuta in una sola persona, abitante le coste del Mar Nero e avrebbe causato la cessazione di produzione del pigmento castano, modificandolo in blu.
Fonte: www.medicinalive.com
Blue eye color in humans may be caused by a perfectly associated founder mutation in a regulatory element located within the HERC2 gene inhibiting OCA2 expression.
The human eye color is a quantitative trait displaying multifactorial inheritance. Several studies have shown that the OCA2 locus is the major contributor to the human eye color variation. By linkage analysis of a large Danish family, we finemapped the blue eye color locus to a 166 Kbp region within the HERC2 gene. By association analyses, we identified two SNPs within this region that were perfectly associated with the blue and brown eye colors: rs12913832 and rs1129038. Of these, rs12913832 is located 21.152 bp upstream from the OCA2 promoter in a highly conserved sequence in intron 86 of HERC2. The brown eye color allele of rs12913832 is highly conserved throughout a number of species. As shown by a Luciferase assays in cell cultures, the element significantly reduces the activity of the OCA2 promoter and electrophoretic mobility shift assays demonstrate that the two alleles bind different subsets of nuclear extracts. One single haplotype, represented by six polymorphic SNPs covering half of the 3′ end of the HERC2 gene, was found in 155 blue-eyed individuals from Denmark, and in 5 and 2 blue-eyed individuals from Turkey and Jordan, respectively. Hence, our data suggest a common founder mutation in an OCA2 inhibiting regulatory element as the cause of blue eye color in humans. In addition, an LOD score of Z = 4.21 between hair color and D14S72 was obtained in the large family, indicating that RABGGTA is a candidate gene for hair color.
Source: Original Investigation – Human Genetics
Non posso fare a meno di chiedermi chi o cosa abbia agevolato/permesso/effettuato questa mutazione genetica!