February 22, 2013
Image by Mariana Ruiz LadyofHats [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons New research suggests that a once-fatal congenital heart defect — sometimes called “blue baby syndrome” — is influenced by genetic factors that are broadly found in the general population. Different heart malformations lead to [...]
November 15, 2012
You’d be forgiven for assuming your height has nothing to do with the curl of your hair or how flexible you are, but physical traits can sometimes have unexpected connections. Last week at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics in San Francisco, 23andMe’s Principal Scientist and [...]
July 3, 2012
With Nick Eriksson Social norms and preferences aside, it turns out that breast size matters -- but not quite in the way you think. 23andMe’s latest research paper, published in the journal BMC Medical Genetics, shows that genetic factors influence whether women have double As or double Ds. This might [...]
June 18, 2012
A new paper in PLoS Genetics describes discoveries related to the genetics of male pattern baldness, with substantial contributions from the 23andMe community. Led by Dr. Brent Richards of McGill University, the study combined genome-wide association data from seven cohorts, comparing men with "early onset" [...]
October 18, 2011
Type 2 diabetes is characterized by very high levels of sugar in the blood and is the most common form of diabetes. Although eating rich food and leading a sedentary lifestyle contribute to the development of this disease, genetics also play a role. For reasons unclear to researchers, people of South Asian [...]
September 13, 2011
By Bethann Hromatka The saying “men are from Mars, women are from Venus,” may have originated from personality differences between the sexes, but it also rings true for complex diseases that affect one sex more than the other. For instance, the prevalence of autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid [...]
August 17, 2011
As we’ve mentioned here previously, science can be a slow process. Researchers spend a long time -- sometimes upward of five years -- gathering enough people with a particular disease to study, collecting samples and data from them, analyzing that data, and then publishing the results. Imagine if you had to [...]
December 10, 2010
One of 23andMe’s core missions is to accelerate the pace of scientific research and contribute to our understanding of the genetic basis of human health and traits. Central to this mission is our growing database of genotyped customers who have consented to allow us to incorporate their genetic data and [...]
June 29, 2009
Much to the surprise of many scientists, a lot of the SNPs identified in genomewide association studies have not been in the parts of genes that encode the molecular machinery of a cell. Instead, many SNPs have been found on the edges of genes, in regions of DNA that control when the genes get turned on or [...]
June 23, 2009
Genomewide association studies have had some success in finding DNA variants associated with increased risk for bipolar disorder. But researchers from the MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics at Cardiff University in England have taken these studies a step further by looking for common [...]
