Everyone would like to have a perfectly white-skinned face without any defect. But freckles haunt them. Recently, the Research Institute for Skin Disease in Anhui Medical University in China became the first one in the world to spot the location of gene that causes freckles. This has laid a good foundation for detecting the gene that causes freckles and treating freckles.

Professor Zhang Xuejun, director of the Institute said that as a genetic skin disease, yellow-skinned and white-skinned races have higher chances of having freckles which result from variation of an unknown gene in human body. In this sense, techniques touted in the market removing freckles with laser or medicines are only a temporary cure, instead of a permanent cure. Gene studies will offer the only way to erase freckles completely.

The Research Institute for Skin Disease in Anhui Medical University adopted the genome scanning technique to categorize and analyze the samples on a freckle family from Chinese Han nationality. In this research they finally found a location in the fourth chromosome of human body which caused freckles.

Zhang Xuejun said their findings were the first in the world locating the gene causing freckles as there was no record on this so far in the most advanced science materials available from home and abroad. As learned thesis on this research has been published on Journal of Investigative Dermatology, an authoritative international publication in this field. Experts regard it an important step for China in the research of susceptibility gene causing pigment aberration diseases.

(People's Daily April 7, 2004)