An international team of researchers has found 74 regions in DNA that are responsible for children’s performance in school or college. The research results were published in the journal Nature.
Leading geneticists have been analyzing information from various bio-databases for several years. At the moment, they have studied more than 300 thousand genomes of residents of 15 different countries. In order to find any changes in them that affect academic performance, scientists had to compare almost 9 million small mutations. And here’s what turned out.
Looking at the most influential region of DNA, the difference between double presence and absence will be expressed in nine weeks of study. This means that children without this mutation can catch up with peers with a good genome in about two months of extra classes.
Daniel Benjamin of the University of Southern California at Los Angeles comments on the study: “Both genes and the environment affect academic success. Those mutations in DNA that have been found are responsible for subtle differences in academic performance. On average, this is 0,43-1 percent of the total number of differences. So it would be inappropriate to call them “genes for education or achievement”, because our DNA is made up of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of such areas. “
Well, we are waiting for new research by geneticists that will help to understand How long a person’s success depends on his genome, upbringing and social environment.