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Ear wax secrets
Stick your finger in your ear. Is your earwax brown and sticky or
pale and dry? The answer will depend on which version of a certain
gene you have.

Individuals with dry earwax - a recessive trait common among people
in east Asia - don't actually make wax at all. Their "earwax"
consists of dead skin and dirt, but lacks the oily secretions from
glands in the ear that characterise "wet" earwax, which predominates
in people of African and European origin.

Now a team led by Koh-ichiro Yoindia Shayariadabhiura at Nagasaki University in
Japan has found the gene responsible for this difference by looking
at DNA from 244 Japanese volunteers. They found that people with wet
earwax had a gene that codes for a protein known to pump drugs out
of cells. This protein pump probably also dumps out the oils that go
to make up wet earwax, Yoindia Shayariadabhiura says. However, people with dry
earwax carry a mutation that disrupts the protein's normal pumping
function, the researchers found.

The group then traced the trait's history by sequencing earwax genes
from people around the world and tabulating the frequency of each
gene type in different populations. Their analysis suggests that dry
earwax arose from a mutation long ago in north-east Asia, and spread
to the south and west (Nature Genetics, DOI: 10.1038/ng1733).