However, there are small differences. Dr. Leonid Kruglyak and his group at the Hutchinson's Human Biology Division play a key role in the new project and will help to determine which of the hundreds of SNPs are important for further testing of the potential links between disease susceptibility and resistance, and common human diseases, Nickerson said. We already know that genetic differences help determine such characteristics as height and eye color. And we know that rare inherited differences can cause diseases like Huntington's disease, cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anemia. What's not known is how more commonly inherited differences might be involved in the development of more common problems such as heart disease, asthma, emphysema or high blood pressure.
Inflammation is the response to damage such as trauma or exposure to chemicals and infection.
Inflammatory responses in the body are suspected in heart disease and stroke, and are known to be involved in many lung diseases like asthma or emphysema. There are hundreds of proteins involved in inflammation, Nickerson said. So researchers will be studying differences among 50 people to find the common variations in hundreds of proteins. And as if that was not complex enough, those 50 people will have a genetic code with a hundred or so variations each. To analyze these massive data sets, Nickerson uses a program that she and UW colleagues have developed, called PolyPhred, that identifies SNPs.