The Genetics of Human Pigmentary Disorders

Abstract

Interest in the genetics of human and animal pigmentation is longstanding. Variation in human pigmentary form— of skin, hair, and eyes—is one of the most striking polymorphic human traits. Ever since Charles Darwin, biologists have been asking how and why did Nature fashion men so differently across the earth? Moving beyond what we might consider natural physiological variation in skin color to the pathological, human pigmentary disorders such as albinism is often clinically striking. Therefore, some syndromes were described early in modern medical history, and what we would now recognize as modern genetic insights into their nature were present almost as early as the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s work just over a century ago. The two decades spanning the start of the twenty-first century have been extraordinarily productive for those interested in human pigment genetics. Of course, the influence and power of what was once called the ‘‘New Genetics’’ has been felt across much of modern biomedicine, but to this skin-watcher, at least, few areas of study have seen such progress with apparently so modest an investment in funding. Recounting the story of this advance is necessary not merely to pay homage to those who laid the foundations that later successes were built on, but also as a lesson for those working in other fields of biomedicine where the problems often appear less tractable. The development of the mouse fancy, and the subsequent institutionalization of this in the twentieth century, provided a fertile resource for those keen to understand mammalian biology (Lamoreux et al., 2010). Interest in this topic, however, was not limited to those, such as skin biologists or dermatologists, whose interests are—professionally speaking—skin deep, but included those far-sighted biologists who recognized that the astonishing diversity of murine coat color mutants offered a way to address the general problem of how genes work. When technological advances in molecular genetics made mammalian gene identification almost routine, the resource of the mouse fancy offered an unrivaled experimental model system both for those interested in human pigmentation and for those whose goals were more general.