Issue 25 · June 19, 2026

Expressive, Issue #25

June 19, 2026

This week we published 283 new variant pages and no new studies, so the work was entirely on the interpretation side: taking known GWAS signals and writing them up accurately. The variants this week skew toward large population studies, the kind where an association is statistically solid but the effect on any one person is modest. rs11012077, for example, is one of 12,111 variants tied to adult height in a study of 5.4 million people, which tells you something real about biology and essentially nothing actionable about you. We cover these because they are in your genome and you deserve an honest account of what the research actually says, not a silence or a sales pitch. The new pages are below.

• rs11012077, AMD1P1 - MIR4675, magnitude 2.2
  rs11012077, near the AMD1P1 pseudogene and MIR4675 microRNA, is one of 12,111 common variants significantly linked to adult height in a genome-wide study of 5.4 million people.
• rs11243976, FUBP3, magnitude 2.2
  rs11243976 is a common genetic variant near FUBP3 found among 12,111 SNPs linked to adult height in a 5.4-million-person study, and the alternate allele is associated with reduced FUBP3 gene activity in thyroid tissue.
• rs117863403, COLEC10, magnitude 2.2
  rs117863403, located in the COLEC10 gene, was identified as a genome-wide significant locus in a large UK Biobank genetic study of 35 blood and urine biomarkers across 363,228 individuals.
• rs10794308, IFITM3-AS1, IFITM3, magnitude 2.2
  rs10794308 is a variant at the IFITM3-AS1 and IFITM3 locus identified in a 2026 study of approximately 2.9 million genomes as one of 570 new loci linked to thyroid cancer and four related thyroid conditions.
• rs116267766, LYST - LINC02768, magnitude 2.2
  rs116267766, near LYST and LINC02768, was examined in a 27,000-person cross-ancestry genome-wide study of late-life memory and Alzheimer\'s-related traits, and its alternate allele is associated with reduced LYST gene exp

(no new studies this window)

rs11012077: One Piece of the Height Puzzle

rs11012077 sits near two non-coding elements: AMD1P1, a pseudogene (a stretch of DNA that resembles a gene but does not produce a functional protein), and MIR4675, a microRNA whose small RNA products help regulate which other genes get expressed. The variant came to scientific attention through one of the largest genome-wide association studies ever conducted for a single trait: an analysis of more than 5.4 million people that identified 12,111 common variants significantly linked to adult height. rs11012077 was one of those 12,111.

The association is well-powered statistically, meaning the scale of the study makes a false-positive finding at this locus unlikely. That said, this is observational genetics: the study tells us that people who carry a particular allele at rs11012077 tend, on average across millions of individuals, to differ slightly in height compared to non-carriers. It does not tell us which molecular step connects this locus to bone elongation, or whether the causal variant is rs11012077 itself versus a nearby site in linkage disequilibrium with it. The microRNA context suggests a regulatory role, but the mechanism remains uncharacterized in the published literature.

Height is one of the most polygenic traits in the human genome: thousands of variants each contribute a few millimeters on average, and environment (nutrition, illness during development) accounts for a meaningful share of the variation that genetics does not explain alone. Knowing you carry this allele does not predict your height with any useful precision on its own. We are not claiming this variant determines how tall you are, and nothing here should be read as medical advice or used to guide clinical decisions. What it does tell you is that this specific locus has a replicated, statistically robust relationship with a trait shaped by an enormous number of factors working together.

Get this in your inbox the day it ships, join the beta or paste your email in the sign-up form on any page.