Anthropology.net & prefonal both have posts up which survey a new paper, A Functional Genetic Link between Distinct Developmental Language Disorders:
We found that FOXP2 binds to and dramatically down-regulates CNTNAP2, a gene that encodes a neurexin and is expressed in the developing human cortex. On analyzing CNTNAP2 polymorphisms in children with typical specific language impairment, we detected significant quantitative associations with nonsense-word repetition, a heritable behavioral marker of this disorder (peak association, P=5.0x10-5 at SNP rs17236239). Intriguingly, this region coincides with one associated with language delays in children with autism.
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Specific language impairment (SLI) is a language disorder that affects growing children, who find it inexplicably difficult to pick up the spoken language skills that their peers acquire so effortlessly. Autism is another (perhaps more familiar) developmental disorder and many autistic children…
Today, a new paper published in Nature adds another chapter to the story of FOXP2, a gene with important roles in speech and language. The FOXP2 story is a fascinating tale that I covered in New Scientist last year. It's one of the pieces I'm proudest of so I'm reprinting it here with kind…
Anthropology.net points me to a new paper, Convergent genetic linkage and associations to language, speech and reading measures in families of probands with Specific Language Impairment:
We analyzed genetic linkage and association of measures of language, speech and reading phenotypes to candidate…
Sound familiar? Well, good things come in pairs. A few days ago I posted on a paper which used a linkage analysis to come to the conclusion that an SNP on HERC2 was responsible for the variation in eye color in Europeans. Some background, a gene, OCA2, was implicated in the variation in eye…
My understanding is that one of these SNPs was reported by 23andME: http://spittoon.23andme.com/2008/11/06/snpwatch-genetic-variant-linked-…
According to dbsnp:
the risk allele G is found in
AG: 48.3% Europeans
GG: 15.0% Europeans (HapMap CEU)
This seems to be fairly prevalent.