Are you a lefty? Well, I am. And so was my mom. And her father. AND our daughter. So I was curious to learn how rare genetic factors may contribute to the roughly 10% of us who are left-handed. As reported in GenomeWeb, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands and Radboud University used exome data from the UK Biobank to search for clues. What they found is that variations in the beta-tubulin gene TUBB4B occurred at a rate 2.7 times higher in left-handers than right-handers.
TL;DR I did not find these rare variants, but it never hurts to look.
Naturally, I wanted to see if our daughter and I shared any of these mutations, so I fired up IGV to visualize our WGS data and take a look at TUBB4B. (Click the image to make it larger.)
It turns out that we do not have any of the rare mutations mentioned in the paper, but then again, these particular variations explain only 0.91% of expected heritability. (Left-handedness shows heritability of ~25% in twin-based analysis.)
The search continues–Happy DNA Day!
Other articles in this series include:
GenomeDad Blog 