Genes May Influence Other People Traits Just By Living Together, Researchers Say

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A new study in genetics proved that the genes of a mouse's cage mate can affect its own health and many other ways. The cage mates do this by influencing characteristics once thought to be controlled only by an animal's own genes for its growth rates and the functioning of its immune system.

A postdoctoral fellow at the European Bioinformatics institute in Hinxton, England, Amelie Baud told Live Science, "this is we did not know before. It means we need to stop looking at individuals in isolation and include social partners when we look at an individual's health."

Social interactions contribute to health and disease, but the extent to which the genetic composition of one animal can impact the traits of another that live with it are poorly understood. This is an emerging concept of what the scientists called social or indirect genetic effects.

Per Daily Mail, researchers studied the effects by measuring the association between traits in individual mice and the genetic makeup of their cage mates. They found out that the social genetic effects explained up to 29 percent change in characteristic traits due to a combination of genes and environmental factors or what they call phenotypic variance.

The most traits that are affected by the genetic change according to the researchers were wound healing, immune function, anxiety and weight. In some cases, social genetic effects exceeded that of direct genetic effects or the effect of an individual's own genetic makeup on these traits.

"As a geneticist, I want to provide doctors with information to understand the mechanisms and the causal pathways behind a disease, so they will have a better idea of how to help their patients heal", Baud said. "Our goal is to include the full genetic ecosystem to understand how we influence one another."

With the ongoing research, Amelie Baud and her team could inform patients and doctors on the social contributions to disease, and provide clues as to how to mitigate social influence. The findings highlighted the fact that some of the underlying health and disease appear to be beyond the individual, instead in the hands of one's partner.