Researchers from Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute have found that sex differences could affect the results of a number of mouse model studies and haved implications for human biomedical research based upon mouse model work, Reuters reports.

The researchers examined phenotypic data from 14,250 wildtype and 40,192 mutant mice — from 2,186 single-gene knockout lines — to find that a number of key traits are influenced by sex. As they report in Nature Communications, the Sanger-led researchers found that sex affected some 56.6 percent of quantitative traits such as bone mass and cholesterol levels and nearly 10 percent of qualitative traits like head shape in the wildtype mice. Additionally, in the mutant mice, sex modified the effect of the mutation in 13.3 percent of qualitative traits and 17.7 percent of quantitative traits.

First author Natasha Karp from the Sanger tells New Scientist that she…