Today, a new paper published in Nature adds another chapter to the story of FOXP2, a gene with important roles in speech and language. The FOXP2 story is a fascinating tale that I covered in New Scientist last year. It's one of the pieces I'm proudest of so I'm reprinting it here with kind permission from Roger Highfield, and with edits incorporating new discoveries since the time of writing.
The FOXP2 Story (2009 edition)
Imagine an orchestra full of eager musicians which, thanks to an incompetent conductor, produces nothing more than an unrelieved cacophony. You're starting to appreciate the problem faced by a British family known as KE. About half of its members have severe difficulties with language. They have trouble with grammar, writing and comprehension, but above all they find it hard to coordinate the complex sequences of face and mouth movements necessary for fluid speech.
Thanks to a single genetic mutation, the conductor cannot conduct, and the result is linguistic chaos. In 2001, geneticists looking for the root of the problem tracked it down to a mutation in a gene they named FOXP2. Normally, FOXP2 coordinates the expression of other genes, but in affected members of the KE family, it was broken.
