Despite having mechanisms for both immune resistance and tolerance, any one organism may be overall more skewed toward a tolerant or resistant phenotype depending on individual variation in both traits due to genetic and environmental factors. In mice infected with malaria, different genetic strains of mice fall neatly along a spectrum of being more tolerant but less resistant or more resistant but less tolerant. Patients with autoimmune diseases also often have a unique gene signature and certain environmental risk factors that predispose them to disease. This may have implications for current efforts to identify why certain individuals may be disposed to or protected against autoimmunity, allergy, inflammatory bowel disease, and other such diseases.