Recently, Steven McCarroll, Beth Stevens, Aswin Sekar, and their colleagues at Harvard Medical School provided further evidence in support of this idea. They also described how and why pruning may go wrong, and they have identified the gene responsible.7 The researchers focused on a particular region of the human genome, a locus called the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). This complex of genes on chromosome 6 encodes proteins that are essential for recognizing foreign molecules, a critical step in the body’s immune response. The MHC locus, which had been strongly associated with
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