Johns Hopkins scientists help show link between genetic expression and molecular changes within body tissues

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Johns Hopkins University scientists are part of a research team assessing how a person's genetic profile affects the body. The results could help show how individual genetic differences contribute to disease and guide treatments for heritable disorders such as Alzheimer's, high cholesterol, or Type 1 diabetes.

The human body has highly specialized organs and tissues that function very differently from each other, and each tissue is affected by different DNA sequencing. A variant is a spot in the genome where a person's individual DNA sequence of four biochemicals—adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine—is different from the standard human sequence.