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Your face is one of a kind.  Facial morphology, the way your face looks has long been studied by scientists.

A new study has revealed that craniofacial development, the process your face is created with, has lots to do with your DNA and specific genes that form your unique face.  

Researchers believed that gene enhancers affected the formation of human faces.

For the study, researchers observed transgenic mice.

"We used a combination of epigenomic profiling, in vivo characterization of candidate enhancer sequences, and targeted deletion experiments to examine the role of distant-acting enhancers in the craniofacial development of our mice," said Catia Attanasio, the lead author of the study, in a news release. "This enabled us to identify complex regulatory landscapes, consisting of enhancers that drive spatially complex developmental expression patterns."

According to researchers, by analyzing the mouse lines that showed where craniofacial enhancers where located, they were able to tell that the enhancers played a role in defining face morphology.

Researchers found that there were more than 4,000 enhancer series which were believed to be telling of how genes are involved in the creation of different faces.

"Knowing about the existence of these enhancers, which are inherited from parents to their children just like genes, knowing their exact location in the human genome, and knowing their general activity pattern in craniofacial development should facilitate a better understanding of the connection between genetics and human craniofacial morphology," Visel said. "Our results also offer an opportunity for human geneticists to look for mutations specifically in enhancers that may play a role in birth defects, which in turn may help to develop better diagnostic and therapeutic approaches."

The findings are published in the journal Science.

https://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6157/1241006.abstract?sid=22485a3c-531c-4e6c-b01b-3edd95987cf8