The latest research, published in Science, involves nearly half a million middle-aged people from Britain who volunteered to donate blood samples and answer questionnaires for a project called UK Biobank. Previous quests for genes linked to sexuality have been unconvincing. Studies find that siblings are more likely to share their sexual orientation, which suggests a genetic link. The research is the latest effort in a decades-long quest to understand the inherited component of sexuality. 'It doesn't explain a lot, but it's at least a first step,' says Melinda Mills, a sociologist at Oxford University who was not involved in the study. The study broadly reinforces the observation that both biology and a person's environment influence sexuality, but the results reveal very little about that biology. Researchers looked for genetic variants linked to sexual behavior in new genetic research that analyzed DNA from donated blood samples from nearly half a million middle-aged people from Britain who participated in a project called UK Biobank.Ī huge new study finds a faint hint of genetic variation that may be linked to same-sex behavior.