Fingerprints are skin features that everyone has, but does it have anything to do with our physical development and health? A recent study led by Fudan University and the Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health of the Chinese Academy of Sciences revealed this mystery for the first time, confirming that there is a high genetic association between human fingerprints and limb development, and this major achievement was published today (January 7) in the first issue of the international top biology journal "Cell" in 2022.
For a long time, people generally believe that fingerprints are only a genetic feature related to the skin, in 2018, China launched the "human phenotype group" international big science program to conduct more in-depth genetic research on various human life characteristics. The relevant teams of Fudan University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences collected fingerprint patterns from various ethnic groups and analyzed nearly one million genetic loci, and finally confirmed that limb development-related genes played a leading role in the formation of fingerprint pattern phenotypes.
Fudan University postdoc Li Jinxi: Finally, fingerprint development was screened, there are 43 loci, in fact, there are thousands of loci. We are actually still quite surprised to find so much at once, and there is still a very strong regularity between them, while pointing to limb development.
Wang Sijia, a researcher at the Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health of the Chinese Academy of Sciences: For example, the length of the finger, we found that the more people with bucket patterns, the longer their little finger is, which is very interesting. The most groundbreaking thing about this study is that we have never found what genes are behind the differences in fingerprint patterns before, and we are the first to find that the differences in fingerprints are caused by genes related to limb development.
Cracking the genetic code of fingerprints for the first time is not only a theoretical achievement, but also a long-term prospect for human phenotype research. Through the in-depth study of human external characteristics and genetic genes, it has great value in various fields such as early screening of congenital diseases, prevention of human lesions, and selection of occupational physique, and the current scientific research team has cooperated with medical institutions to further expand practical research in the application field.
Wang Sijia, researcher at the Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, Chinese Academy of Sciences: We take Down syndrome as an example, after a small child is born, after I get his fingerprint characteristics, I can have 98% accuracy to determine whether this child has Down syndrome in the end, if you find it at the age of 0, this intervention is very different from the intervention effect found at the age of two, and the final thing that can lead to is the difference in whether life can take care of itself.
Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Fudan University President Jin Li: The human phenotype group refers to the collection of all biological characteristics of the human body, and a very important purpose of our phenotypic group research is to discover the correlation mechanism between the gene phenotype and the environment and macro and micro performance, especially those that scientists have not noticed now, and the strong association between the phenotypes that are closely related to human health, also brings a huge number of question marks to our scientific community, waiting for us scientists to further study and crack.