Answer to an Important Life Question

I know this post will not mean much to some of the people who may read it, but to some, it might just be as hillarious as it was when I had this long-standing edge-of-your-seat question answered...finally.

I was sitting in my developmental biology class (for some reason my entire life happens at school) and we are learning about limb development. Now this is kind of a boring topic, and to be honest I was only half paying attention. The other half of my attention was somewhere off in graduate school applications (soo stressful).

Anyways, the prof is blabbing on and on about different genes and mutations that can cause abnormal arms / legs / wings etc to form when suddenly I looked up at the slide presentation and guess what I saw?

An Exact Replica of Kiki's feet!!

Now, Kiki (as we lovingly refered to her as) was a summer student at my previous place of employment (being discreet here to avoid legal complications). She loved to come to work wearing flashy sandles that drew a ridiculous amount of attention to her feet. AND she had naked toes, which is a total workplace no-no.


So I couldn't find a good example on the net so I had to do a semi-accurate drawing of her feet. The long and short of it is (haha, I made a funny), that her toes were all really long and finger-like except her big toe, which was short and stubby. Something like this:
So it turns out that at some point in later development her mom injested/exposed to some retinoic acid or some other teratogenic chemical that caused a gene to mutate causing her big toe to be underdeveloped. This apparently happens often in thumbs, big toes and genitals. It's not usually brutally noticable, but if you ever see a person with really weird looking feet or hands (or genitals for that matter) you might think of this post. If you want to read the stupidly-confusing details of the gene, it's called Hoxa-13.

Anyways, it's 1AM but I had to get that outta me. I laughed silently but very histarically in a small lecture room. I was totally red in the face. I felt hot, and as soon as lecture was over, I told the first person I saw (that I knew). It wasn't as funny to her...but if she knew KiKi....hahaha