Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language

10 % of people are left-handed, which occurs when the right cerebral hemisphere is more dominant for the control of that hand - whereas it is the left hemisphere in the case of right-handed people. To investigate the genetic basis of this laterality, scientists in the Netherlands have analysed genome data from 350,000 people in the UK biobank for rare genetic variants associated with this phenomenon. The heritability of left-handedness due to rare coding variants was low, at less than 1%. The research, published in Nature Communications, suggests that one gene - TUBB4B - is 2.7 times more likely to contain rare coding variants in left-handed people.