Wu Ming — 1 year ago(November 06, 2024 07:31 PM)

Why some Families only have Daughters
A new study finds a mutation that causes more girls.
And approaches the complicated question of why there are almost the same number of women as men.
Evolutionary biologists Siliang Song and Jianzhi Zhang from the University of Michigan (USA) wanted to find out whether there are gene variants that influence sex ratios.
For their study they analyzed the information of around 500,000 people from Great Britain, whose data made its way into the UK Biobank, which is popular for research purposes. Zhang and Song note that the data sets were too small and the methods too imprecise in the past. Most people have a manageable number of children, which causes problems for statistics for the family sex ratio based on genes. That explains why no clear evidence was yet found of a genetic variation that could change a girl-boy ratio of around 50:50.
60% Chance of Daughters
The researchers now found such a clear indication for the first time.
They discovered a mutation that increases the probability of having a daughter from 50% to 60%.
The exact role of the associated ADAMTS14 gene isn't yet clear, but it influences ovulation, sperm production and fertilization. The team also found two additional variants of genes that could affect sex ratios and suspects that there may be more. It still needs to be checked whether the mutations are also related to a changed sex ratio in other data sets.
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https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2024.1876
October 16, 2024
https://www.derstandard.de/story/3000000241675/warum-manche-familien-nur-toechter-haben
October 23, 2024
https://www.eltern.de/familie-urlaub/wissenschaft--darum-werden-in-manchen-familien-nur-maedchen-geboren-13899956.html
November 04, 2024
Currently 335 posts for the standard article.
My personal favourite:
Nungsvoll
Years ago I met a Libyan who had 10 daughters and his wife was pregnant again.
It was very bad for him not to have any sons.
Ribisl
Nobody cares about how bad it was for the woman to give birth to eleven children, huh?