I am left handed with two variations – I bat rightie and my dominant kicking leg is right. And now I'm even more special!<\/p>\n
Rare Genetic Variants That May Be Linked to Left-Handedness<\/a><\/p>\n Around 90 percent of people are right-handed, and 10 percent are left-handed. Which hand people rely on is a result of brain asymmetry\u2014when it comes to hand control, left-handed people have dominant right sides of their brain, while righties have dominant left sides, per the study.<\/p>\n This asymmetry develops in the womb and manifests in different ways. \u201cFor example, most people have left-hemisphere dominance for language, and right-hemisphere dominance for tasks that require directing visual attention to a location in space,\u201d Clyde Francks<\/a>, a co-author of the new study and a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, tells Reuters<\/a>\u2019 Will Dunham.<\/p>\n ********************************<\/p>\n The team examined data from the UK Biobank\u2014a massive biomedical database\u2014analyzing genes from 38,043 lefties and 313,271 righties. The TUBB4B variants were present in fewer than 1 percent of people, but they were 2.7 times more likely to appear in lefties than in righties.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is an important and significant study\u201d that supports the role of tubulins in determining the asymmetry between the brain\u2019s hemispheres, Sebastian Ocklenburg<\/a>, a neuroscientist at the Medical School Hamburg in Germany who did not contribute to the findings, tells Nature News<\/em><\/a>\u2019 Sumeet Kulkarni.<\/p>\n The findings provide further evidence that microtubules are connected to whether a person prefers to use their right or left hand, the study authors write. And the researchers offer a possible reason why: Microtubules support the structure and movement of cilia, hair-like organelles sticking out of cells that can direct the flow of surrounding fluid. An uneven fluid flow, they suggest in the paper, might play a role in the development of brain asymmetry.<\/p>\n While rare genetic variants only affect a small number of people, they \u201ccan give clues to developmental mechanisms of brain asymmetry in everyone,\u201d Francks tells Nature News<\/em>.<\/p>\n Still, handedness could come down to chance a lot of the time. \u201cWe think that most instances of left-handedness occur simply due to random variation during development of the embryonic brain, without specific genetic or environmental influences,\u201d Francks says to Reuters.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am left handed with two variations – I bat rightie and my dominant kicking leg is right. And now I'm even more special! Rare Genetic Variants That May Be Linked to Left-Handedness Around 90 percent of people are right-handed, and 10 percent are left-handed. Which hand people rely on is a result of brain […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=165"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7010,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165\/revisions\/7010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}