A team with researchers from more than 10 institutions from China and abroad have identified genes that play a key role in shaping fingerprints, which may inspire new approaches for the early diagnosis of some congenital diseases.

The findings, published in the latest edition of the journal Cell, were made by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Fudan University, University of Edinburgh and other institutions in the United States, India and Australia.

After scanning and analyzing the genomes of more than 23,000 individuals, they identified 43 fingerprint-associated genetic loci in human chromosomes, many of them unreported.