Magnesium Levels

Your result, the one DNA position behind it, and what the research says.

5/10 confidence.

About Magnesium Levels

Magnesium is involved in several hundred enzyme reactions, and the body holds its blood level in a narrow band by adjusting how much the kidney reabsorbs. This position sits in MUC1, a mucin gene the kidney expresses, and it comes out attached to blood magnesium in large studies. The channel that does the reabsorbing sits on a different chromosome, so why this position tracks magnesium is not settled. Blood magnesium is not a good picture of total body magnesium - most of it is in bone and inside cells - so read this as a small shift in a tightly held number.

Good to know: This describes a blood level, not how much of the nutrient you need or should take. Blood levels move with diet, season and time of day as well as with genetics. The genetic effect measured here is small next to intake.

Fun fact: Only about one percent of the body's magnesium is in blood at all: the rest is locked in bone and inside cells, which is why blood tests are a poor guide to magnesium status.

Discovery: Blood magnesium was mapped genome-wide in large population studies.

The Variant

The single variant behind this trait

Gene: MUC1

Variant (rsID): rs4072037

Location: Chr 1:155,192,276

dbSNP rs4072037

The studies

Genome-wide association studies of serum magnesium, potassium, and sodium concentrations identify six Loci influencing serum magnesium levels (Meyer TE et al., PLoS genetics, 2010)

Genetic loci for serum magnesium among African-Americans and gene-environment interaction at MUC1 and TRPM6 in European-Americans: the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study (Tin A et al., BMC genetics, 2015)

Other lifestyle traits

Monounsaturated Fat Levels: A change inside the PDXDC1 gene, linked to how much monounsaturated fat circulates in blood.

Omega-6 Levels: A change near COBLL1, linked to what share of your blood fatty acids is linoleic acid, the main omega-6.

Omega-3 Conversion: A variant in the gene for the desaturase enzyme that converts plant-based omega-3 fats into the long-chain forms the body actually uses.

Back to All Traits

Content updated September 2026.

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