Genetic variability is a measure of the tendency of individual genotypes in a population to vary from one another. Variability is different from genetic diversity, which is the amount of variation seen in a particular population. The variability of a trait describes how much that trait tends to vary in response to environmental and genetic influences. Genetic variability in a population is important for biodiversity, because without variability, it becomes difficult for a population to adapt to environmental changes and therefore makes it more prone to extinction.
Variability is an important factor in evolution as it affects an individual's response to environmental stress and thus can lead to differential survival of organisms within a population due to natural selection of the most fit variants. Genetic variability also underlies the differential susceptibility of organisms to diseases and sensitivity to toxins or drugs — a fact that has driven increased interest in personalized medicine given the rise of the human genome project and efforts to map the extent of human genetic variation such as the HapMap project.
Read more about Genetic Variability: Causes
Famous quotes containing the words genetic and/or variability:
“Man is not merely the sum of his masks. Behind the shifting face of personality is a hard nugget of self, a genetic gift.... The self is malleable but elastic, snapping back to its original shape like a rubber band. Mental illness is no myth, as some have claimed. It is a disturbance in our sense of possession of a stable inner self that survives its personae.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“The grand points in human nature are the same to-day they were a thousand years ago. The only variability in them is in expression, not in feature.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)