An international scientific study reveals that the shape of the human face essentially depends on five genes . Monozygotic or univitelline (identical) twins have nearly the same face, and siblings tend to have more similar faces than unrelated people. However, until now hardly anything was known about the genetics responsible for facial morphology in humans.
The authors of the new study, published in PLoS Genetics , used MRI images of the heads of 10,000 subjects, as well as photographs of their portraits, in order to map the "facial landscape" of their faces, estimating among others things the distances between the eyes, the mouth and the nose, the width of the forehead, the eyebrows, the chin, the cheekbones, the total facial height, etc. In this way they found five genes whose variants determine if a face is oval or rectangular , if the nose is flat or upturned, how far apart the eyes are, etc.
With the data obtained, Manfred Kaysern, from the Erasmus University Medical Center (Rottedam, Netherlands) and his colleagues believe that it would be possible to make a ghost portrait of an individual from a simple remnant of their DNA , a tool that would be very useful for forensics.
