Genetics of eye colour unlocked

They found that just a few "letters" out of the six billion that make up the genetic code are responsible for most of the variation in human eye colour. The research, by a team of scientists from Queensland, Australia, will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics. The findings are based on a genetic study of nearly 4,000 individuals. Differences in eye colour are largely down to "single nucleotide polymorphisms" (SNPs - pronounced "snips"); variations in the sequence of letters that make up a single strand of human DNA. SNPs represent a change of just one letter in the genetic sequence. These changes, or mutations, in our DNA can have important consequences for how the gene gets physically expressed. All the SNPs are located near a gene called OCA2. This gene produces a protein that... Whole article: "www.news.bbc.co.uk":[ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6195091.stm]

---