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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Hundreds of genes influence how tall a person is, but most make an imperceptible difference—perhaps a millimeter, for example. Now, a group studying the genetics of Peruvians, one of the world's shortest populations, has turned up a gene variant that cuts a person's height by more than 2 centimeters, on average. "It's amazing that they saw such a change," says Emma Farley, a genomicist at the University of California, San Diego. "It's quite a large effect."

Geneticists have diligently pursued genes for height; a 2014 analysis called GIANT examined 250,000 people. "That you can still pull out new players is very exciting," says Elaine Ostrander, a geneticist at the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. "It speaks to the value of looking at isolated populations." So far, the gene variant is not known outside Peru, where the demands of living at high altitude may have driven its evolution, but it could offer clues about how other mutations influence height.

Postdoc Samira Asgari and Soumya Raychaudhuri's team, all at Harvard Medical School in Boston, originally wanted to know how a person's DNA influences the severity of tuberculosis. Together with epidemiologist Megan Murray's team at Partners in Health in Lima, they collected genetic information from 4002 residents there, along with other data including height. Peruvians are among the shortest people in the world, with men averaging 165 centimeters and women reaching about 153 centimeters—in both cases about 10 centimeters shorter than average people in the United States and 15 centimeters shorter than the Dutch, generally regarded as among the world's tallest people. So the team decided to search the DNA data for genetic factors underlying this short stature.

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