In March, Oxford University researchers pinpointed variations of agene that controls dopamine, a brain chemical associated with feelings of pleasure, as playing a key role in smoking addiction.
Investigators compared consumption data from more than 33, 000 adults with a composite of the 32 loci a scientific term for the location of agene known to be associated with BMI.
The paper in PNAS suggests that the actual positioning of the motifs is associated with small RNA molecules that are involved with a process called post-transcriptional gene silencing (PTGS).