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Losing one’s virginity is traditionally believed to be something brought up as a matter of choice. Normally such would be lost due to serious relationships though there could be some who would give it up for the reason of experiencing sexual intercourse.

Other than that, there was no clear way to explain it though a study claims that DNA could possibly back it up by determining the actual age when a person would lose their virginity.

Researchers were able to determine the differences in DNA per the Guardian:

“We were able to calculate for the first time that there is a heritable component to age at first sex, and the heritability is about 25%, so one quarter nature, three quarters nurture,” said John Perry who is an expert in reproductive ageing and related health conditions at Cambridge University.

In the study, it was found that 38 sections of DNA were tied up with the age when people had first had sex that reportedly drove people to reproductive biology.

CADM2, one of the variants of the genes, was linked to the early start of a person’s sex life and included risk-taking behavior and having a large number of offsprings.

Another variant, MSRA, showed how people lost their virginity but as a result of irritability.

Other than the two variants, Natural Genetics scientists singled out an interesting characteristic that was linked to hair color (red) and freckled skin though the claim covers only women.

As far as the common age is concerned for people losing their virginity, a look at the UK BioBank project (which had over 125,000 people enrolled and aged 40 to 69) lost their virginity when they were 18 years of age.

Puberty was also singled out as a factor though it had a small impact on the age. Scientists claim that such was normally brought up due to poor nutrition which was ultimately tied up to childhood obesity.

“Genetics only contributes a small part to age of first sexual intercourse, but the very random nature of each person’s genome means it can be used to trace the impact of this behaviour into later life with less concern about complex correlations confusing cause and consequence,” says Ewan Birney, the co-director of the European Bioinformatics Institute near Cambridge.