Surrey study helps to discover the link between genes and face shape
Tuesday 10 July 2012
A study to identify genetic information responsible for our facial appearance is being carried out at the University of Surrey’s Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP) in collaboration with geneticists in Oxford. The study is part of a major research project headed by Professor Sir Walter Bodmer at Oxford, which is aimed at determining genetic map of Britain. The remarkable finding about the map is how much people sharing similar gene variations cluster geographically.
The work was recently featured at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition and forms part of an exhibit describing a collaborative project with the University of Oxford’s Department of Oncology. The project, which is funded by the Wellcome Trust, aims to link genetic information collected and analysed at Oxford to gene expression in the form of face shape. The face analysis work at CVSSP involves measuring the shape of facial features, such as nose and eyes, in 3D photographs of a large population of subjects to look for individuals at the extreme ranges, with a view to pinpointing those individuals with the largest genetic differences.
Josef Kittler, Professor of Machine Intelligence and Head of Department of Electronic Engineering at Surrey, comments: "The link between DNA and face shape is not only of scientific interest, but could in future help to solve crimes by providing the ability to predict a suspect's facial appearance from DNA samples collected at a crime scene."
Editors' Notes
For further information please visit: http://www.peopleofthebritishisles.org/ or http://cvssp-data.eps.surrey.ac.uk/pobi/
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