The Curious Genetics of Werewolves

The “wolf boy” brothers have Ambras syndrome, a single-gene condition that may have inspired the werewolf legend. (Gary Moore photo)

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Growing up in the 1960s, I collected monster cards: The 60-foot-man and the 50-foot woman, duplicate bodies gestating in giant seed pods, unseen Martians that sucked children into sand pits and returned them devoid of emotion, with telltale marks on the back of the neck. One card featured a very young Michael Landon in “I Was a Teenage Werewolf.”

Forgive my lapse in political correctness, but I recalled those cards when I saw the word “hypertrichosis” in a recent paper in PLOS Genetics, because, unfortunately, the condition is also known historically as “werewolf syndrome.”

In the paper, geneticist Angela Christiano, PhD, and colleagues at Columbia University analyzed the genomes of a father and son with Ambras syndrome, a form of hypertrichosis – and found something intriguing about the causative mutation that has repercussions for genetic testing in general.

read more: http://blogs.plos.org/dnascience/2012/12/27/the-curious-genetics-of-werewolves/