Many of the facial features of a person - for example, the size of the nose and the width of the face - are determined by certain genetic variations. This is reported in the PLOS Genetics magazine.
There are few specific studies describing the links between genetics and facial features - few have been able to establish the exact relationship between a particular gene and a property of appearance. To solve this problem, the authors of the article conducted a genome-wide search for associations: between 20 facial features of 3118 healthy Europeans and about a million single nucleotide polymorphisms.
Scientists have discovered genes responsible for several facial features. Thus, the length of the nose was associated with CHD8 and ZNF219, the width with PAX1, the width of the face with PAX9, MIPOL1 and MAFB, and the distance between the eyes with HDAC8, GNAI3, and ALX3. In the future, researchers are going to identify genetic risk factors that lead to developmental abnormalities such as cleft palate and cleft lip.
In 2013, biologists discovered regulatory sequences in DNA that are responsible for the formation of individual facial features in mammals, including humans. These elements belong to the class of enhancers - non-coding DNA fragments that, with the help of special proteins, affect the activity of genes. These genes can be located at a distance of tens of thousands of nucleotides from the enhancer itself - they come into contact due to DNA looping.