This season of winter solstice holiday is a time where family and our loved ones stay close together to keep the fire burning and sustain the warm in our hearts. A season I really miss because we all gather for family reunion celebrated by all. (Birthdays can be a get together but we do celebrate that for the celebrants, hehehe). Being not there makes me feel blue.
Just like the absence of melanin in the eye gave birth to a blue eye. But it’s not a bad thing after all. It has its own beauty that makes us wish to have it as well. Well at least that’s one good news how being blue can be a good thing. We can always find reason to wish and move on.
Blue eyes have their hue because of a single genetic mutation that occurred fewer than 10,000 years ago in one individual and swept rapidly through the European population, according to a study published in the journal Human Genetics in January.
After studying some 800 individuals from Denmark, Turkey, and Jordan, the researchers pinpointed a single base-pair change in the human genome that showed up in all the blue-eyed people and none of the brown-eyed people. “There was one founder mutation that gave rise to all the people in Europe who have blue eyes,” says report coauthor Jesper Troelsen, a University of Copenhagen molecular biologist. “It was quite surprising.”
Those with blue eyes also shared a number of other genetic markers in the same region—a stretch of DNA that regulates production of the pigment melanin. The tweak causes the iris to manufacture less melanin, lending the eyes their lighter shade.
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