Traditionally there has been an intense debate about which parts of our personality, our abilities and our capacities that are the result of Genetic heritage and which are the result of the environment in which we develop.
Now, contributing evidence to this controversy, a new scientific study published in the specialized media Genes, Brain & Behavior has identified several genetic variants that could be related with our math skills.
Up to 10 significant associations
Specifically, it is a genome-wide association study (a method that uses genome sequencing in a population sample to find those genomic variants that are associated with a certain trait). In this case, they were looking for those genetic code segments appearing to be related to performance in 11 different categories of math skills, in a sample of 1,146 primary school students in China.
In this way, they found seven single nucleotide variants in the genome that were strongly related to these abilities. Additional analyzes significantly related three categories of mathematical ability with three specific genes; specifically, certain variants in the LINGO2 gene were associated with subtraction ability, some in the OAS1 gene with spatial reasoning, and variants with HECTD1 were associated with division ability.
In the opinion of the authors, these results provide evidence that supports the idea that different mathematical abilities could have a distinct genetic base. Thus, this work, they say, not only refines the genetic studies carried out to date with respect to mathematical abilities, but also contributes to diversify the population sample studied up to now, due to the fact that it was carried out on students from Chinese schools.
References
Liming Zhang, Zhengjun Wang, Zijian Zhu, Qing Yang, Chen Cheng, Shunan Zhao, Chunyu Liu, Jingjing Zhao. A genome-wide association study identified new variants associated with mathematical abilities in Chinese children. Genes, Brain & Behavior (2023). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/gbb.12843