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SLC24A5
 
 
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SLC24A5 (solute carrier family 24, member 5) is a gene
Gene

A gene is the basic unit of heredity in a living organism. All living things depend on genes. Genes hold the information to build and maintain their cell and pass genetic trait to offspring....
 that is thought to explain between 25 and 38% of skin pigmentation variation between Black
Black people

Black people is a term usually referring to a Race of humans with a dark skin color, but the term has also been used to categorise a number of diverse populations into one common group....
 African and White
White people

White people is a term which is usually used to refer to Human characterized, at least in part, by the light Human skin color. It often refers narrowly to people claiming ancestry exclusively from Europe....
 European human
Human

A human being, also human or man, is a member of a species of bipedalism primates in the family Hominidae . Mitochondrial DNA evidence indicates that modern humans originated in east Africa about 200,000 years ago....
s.

Research done by a large team at Penn State University and a number of other institutions discovered that the gene has two primary allele
Allele

An allele is one member of a pair or series of different forms of a gene. Usually alleles are coding region, but sometimes the term is used to refer to a junk DNA....
s that differ in only one nucleotide
Nucleotide

Nucleotides are molecules that comprise the structural units of RNA and DNA. Additionally, nucleotides play central roles in metabolism. In that capacity, they serve as sources of chemical energy , participate in cell signaling , and are incorporated into important cofactors of enzymatic reactions ....
, changing the 111th amino acid
Amino acid

In chemistry, an amino acid is a molecule containing both amine and carboxyl functional groups. These molecules are particularly important in biochemistry, where this term refers to alpha-amino acids with the general formula H2NCHRCOOH, where R is an organic substituent....
 from alanine
Alanine

Alanine is an a-amino acid with the chemical formula CH3CHCOOH. The L-isomer is one of the 20 proteinogenic amino acids, i.e. the building blocks of proteins....
 to threonine
Threonine

Threonine is an a-amino acid with the chemical formula HO2CCHCHCH3. Its codons are ACU, ACA, ACC, and ACG. This essential amino acid is classified as Chemical polarity....
.

The threonine allele was present in 98.7 to 100% among several European samples, while the alanine form was found in 93 to 100% of samples of Africans, East Asians and Indigenous Americans.






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SLC24A5 (solute carrier family 24, member 5) is a gene
Gene

A gene is the basic unit of heredity in a living organism. All living things depend on genes. Genes hold the information to build and maintain their cell and pass genetic trait to offspring....
 that is thought to explain between 25 and 38% of skin pigmentation variation between Black
Black people

Black people is a term usually referring to a Race of humans with a dark skin color, but the term has also been used to categorise a number of diverse populations into one common group....
 African and White
White people

White people is a term which is usually used to refer to Human characterized, at least in part, by the light Human skin color. It often refers narrowly to people claiming ancestry exclusively from Europe....
 European human
Human

A human being, also human or man, is a member of a species of bipedalism primates in the family Hominidae . Mitochondrial DNA evidence indicates that modern humans originated in east Africa about 200,000 years ago....
s.

Research done by a large team at Penn State University and a number of other institutions discovered that the gene has two primary allele
Allele

An allele is one member of a pair or series of different forms of a gene. Usually alleles are coding region, but sometimes the term is used to refer to a junk DNA....
s that differ in only one nucleotide
Nucleotide

Nucleotides are molecules that comprise the structural units of RNA and DNA. Additionally, nucleotides play central roles in metabolism. In that capacity, they serve as sources of chemical energy , participate in cell signaling , and are incorporated into important cofactors of enzymatic reactions ....
, changing the 111th amino acid
Amino acid

In chemistry, an amino acid is a molecule containing both amine and carboxyl functional groups. These molecules are particularly important in biochemistry, where this term refers to alpha-amino acids with the general formula H2NCHRCOOH, where R is an organic substituent....
 from alanine
Alanine

Alanine is an a-amino acid with the chemical formula CH3CHCOOH. The L-isomer is one of the 20 proteinogenic amino acids, i.e. the building blocks of proteins....
 to threonine
Threonine

Threonine is an a-amino acid with the chemical formula HO2CCHCHCH3. Its codons are ACU, ACA, ACC, and ACG. This essential amino acid is classified as Chemical polarity....
.

The threonine allele was present in 98.7 to 100% among several European samples, while the alanine form was found in 93 to 100% of samples of Africans, East Asians and Indigenous Americans. The variation is a SNP
Single nucleotide polymorphism

A single-nucleotide polymorphism is a DNA sequence variation occurring when a single nucleotide — adenine, thymine, cytosine, or guanine — in the genome differs between members of a species ....
 polymorphism rs1426654, which had been previously shown to be second among 3011 tabulated SNPs ranked as ancestry-informative marker
Ancestry-informative marker

An ancestry-informative marker is a set of polymorphisms for a locus, generally from humans, which exhibits substantially different frequencies between populations from different geographical regions....
s. They also showed that SLC24A5 explains between 25 and 38% of the European-African difference in skin melanin
Melanin

Melanin is a class of compounds found in the plant, animal, and protista kingdom , where it serves predominantly as a pigment. The class of pigments are derivatives of the amino acid tyrosine....
 index.

The discovery of this gene may have interesting social consequences because of its bearing on the genetics of ethnic differences. It has obvious application to forensic science as well.

The SLC24A5 gene is located on the long (q) arm of chromosome 15
Chromosome 15 (human)

Chromosome 15 is one of the 23 pairs of chromosomes in humans. People normally have two copies of this chromosome. Chromosome 15 spans about 106 million base pairs and represents between 3% and 3.5% of the total DNA in cell ....
 on position 21.1, from base pair
Base pair

In molecular biology, two nucleotides on opposite complementarity DNA or RNA strands that are connected via hydrogen bonds are called a base pair ....
 46,200,461 to base pair 46,221,881.

It is currently estimated that the threonine allele became predominant amongst Europeans 5,300 to 12,000 years ago.

See also

  • Race


External links