Thus, race or ethnic origin can sometimes serve as a useful surrogate for more precisely defined genetic differences.
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Genetic differences in people's immune systems may also explain why some people respond much better to antibody drugs than others.
The companies hope to overcome the problem of small genetic differences that can make standard drugs ineffective or produce unpleasant side-effects.
These days, when talk turns to the supposed genetic differences in the intelligence of certain races, Southern Italians have disappeared from the discussion.
Second, nobody wants to pay for the studies required to figure out which genetic differences correlate with all of these diseases and drugs.
It is tracking patients in these trials to see if genetic differences in their cancers could account for whether or not Tarceva works.
The data will be studied to uncover genetic differences that might explain why some people respond to standard medications and some do not.
It will take years for Dirks and others to unravel the genetic differences between regular and mutant stem cells to reveal targets for new drugs.
Right now, a flood of new genetic variants that predict disease are emerging, thanks to devices that compare thousands of common genetic differences between people.
He said the team were currently working to understand if the genetic differences between SIVcpz and HIV evolved as a response to the species jump.
It found that genetic differences account for 24% of the variation.
Throw in other environmental and behavioral factors (smoking, drinking, obesity and so on), and the variability exceeds that contributed by any genetic differences we will ever detect.
One of their programs displays stretches of DNA in a three-dimensional color format that a customer can use, for example, to pinpoint the genetic differences between healthy and cancerous prostate tissue.
By comparing DNA from healthy cells with malignant ones, researchers can find genetic differences that might be what led the tumors to go bad in the first place.
At the same time, many prominent geneticists, including those who mapped the human genome, have publicly said that genetic differences, especially those that occur along racial lines, don't amount to much.
This might pave the way for the way regulators will have to think about drugs in the future, when many medicines might target small, genetic differences that only a small number of people have.
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And the genome maps created by the government and Celera Genomics, the biotech Venter headed back in 2000, are averages of several individuals, so they miss the very genetic differences that would cause disease.
Genetic analysis led by a team at Sweden's Uppsala University found that the woman closely resembled modern-day Southern Europeans and had many genetic differences from three hunter-gatherers living at the same time in Sweden and buried nearby.
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After months of e-mails, calls and in-person meetings, Van Tassell convinced Illumina that it was worth marketing a small gene chip that could keep track of 38, 000 tiny genetic differences in cows that his USDA researchers had discovered.
The literature on similarities and differences between ES cells and iPS cells, he said, is quite controversial and scientists still do not know whether differences between different iPS cell lines are just due to genetic differences between the adult cell lines that were used for reprogramming or whether genetic changes occurred during reprogramming.
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Purely biological effects, such as genetic or nutritional differences, can probably be ruled out.
For the first time, there are enough of the elderly around to compare their genetic makeups and see what differences can explain why some people live a full century and others make it only three-quarters of the way.
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These studies have been made possible by the growth in catalogues and maps of genetic variation among human populations, as well as differences with our closest relatives, such as Neanderthal and chimpanzee.
This meant that any differences in behaviour would unlikely be due to genetic or ecological influences.
New work on the X has now revealed more about how differences between the sexes are determined at a genetic level.
The ethnic differences cited in the study could have to do with genetic predisposition, but that connection has yet to be defined, Mattox said.
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Church points out that the differences were exactly what would have been predicted by previous studies of genetic diversity, including the government-funded HapMap project.
He said the differences from one population to another "cannot be accounted for either by genetic make-up or environmental influences".
This helps to explain differences in the outcome of identical treatments for apparently identical cancers: at the genetic level those cancers are not identical at all.
These differences between individuals (which are inherited from parents in the same way as other genetic characteristics) mean that studying microsatellites is a good way to see how a number of individuals may be related to one another.
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