Sep 25 2009
For as long as humans have lived in complex communities, cities and civilizations, they have divided and classified their societies. Those divisions have been based on age, gender, appearance or – in many cases – occupation. In many traditional societies artisans would share the same social status; as would soldiers, priests and workers in any [...]
Mar 11 2009
SNPwatch gives you the latest news about research linking various traits and conditions to individual genetic variations. These studies are exciting because they offer a glimpse into how genetics may affect our bodies and health; but in most cases, more work is needed before this research can provide information of value to individuals. For that [...]
Dec 02 2008
SNPwatch gives you the latest news about research linking various traits and conditions to individual genetic variations. These studies are exciting because they offer a glimpse into how genetics may affect our bodies and health; but in most cases, more work is needed before this research can provide information of value to individuals. For that [...]
Oct 15 2008
“I feel like a fish with no water.”
That’s how the child in the public service announcement featuring a flopping, gasping goldfish describes what it feels like to have an asthma attack. The spot encourages parents of the close to nine million kids who suffer from asthma to take steps to decrease the number of [...]
Aug 06 2008
For years I believed that every Mexican restaurant my family took me to had some kind of problem with their dishwashing machine. Why else would the food always taste like soap? No one around me seemed to notice, so I just assumed that everyone else liked the taste of dirty dishwater in their [...]
May 08 2008
Multiple studies have indicated that a SNP in the FGFR2 gene can increase the risk for breast cancer. Results published online this week in the open-access journal PLoS Biology show how.
It turns out that the riskier version of this SNP increases the amount of the FGFR2 protein that is made by cells, which can [...]
May 03 2008
Sometimes our customers ask us about the accuracy of their 23andMe data. How certain are we that they really do have the genotypes we report?
The answer is, very certain. We typically claim that the genotyping technology we use reports the correct call for more than 99.9 percent of the approximately 580,000 single-letter DNA variations we [...]
Mar 28 2008
Genome-wide association studies, which are the source for most of the data 23andMe uses in Gene Journal (now called Health and Traits) entries, are based on the “common disease-common allele model” – the idea that many illnesses, even relatively rare ones, can be caused by combinations of genetic variations that are individually quite common in [...]
