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Semi-Identical Twins Discovered
daftna writes in with a story from Nature about a pair of twins who are neither identical nor fraternal: they are semi-identical. Researchers discovered twins who share all of their mother's DNA but only half of their father's. Both children are chimeras — their cells are not genetically uniform, but include a mix of genes from two separate sperm cells that fertilized a single egg. This is, apparently, not as rare as one might think; but the resulting fetus is rarely viable. This report marks the first known incidence of two half-identical twins resulting from a double fertilization.
We're finding new chimeras every day, now that DNA testing is becoming more common. Discovery Health even had a program where genetic testing showed a mother's children to be the product of her BROTHER and her husband; though she had no brother. Turned out she was a hermaphrodite- some of her cells, including her EGGS, were male- a fraternal twin that had been absorbed early in the gestation process.
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Maybe this was slightly different, but I knew two guys back in high school who were genetically half-identical twins. I guess the condition was caused by the polar body (which normally disentigrates) containing enough cytoplasm to sustain itself, and thus allowing it to be fertilized by a sperm other than its pair. They refered to this as "Polar Body Twins". It is extremely rare, but not unheard of. Furthermore, they really looked the part, being much closer in appearance than fraternal twins, but being subtley different from identical twins.
There seems to be a hot debate over the possibility of this happening. Some scientists fully support the notion that this happens, while some have rejected the notion altogether, citing that polar body's don't "normally" contain enough cytoplasm to sustain themselves. But this sounds like a rediculous arguement, to me, since the exact amount of cytoplasm that is both required for fertilization, and the exact amount that a polar body usually contain, very wildly.
Unfortunately, it's very difficult to confirm whether or not this occurs, since percentage of difference in genetics between both fraternal twins and polar body twins is not exact. Polar Body twins will always contain between 50% to 100% of the same genentics (averaging at 75%0, where-as fraternal twins could be anywhere between 0% to 100% similarity. So, my friends will never actually know whether they developed from identical zygotes, but their genetic makeup was similar enough, that many doctors speculated that this was the case.
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talk about deja vu!
Some time ago, I wondered about the exact situation this article raises.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=130374 &cid=10879347
At the time, it fascinated me because it occured to me that you could have twins which share a maternal set of chromosomes but have one sex chromosome from the father be an X for one of the siblings and the other be a Y.
In other words, almost identical twin brother/sister pair! One wonders how much of gender is actually in our genes. Well, to have a pair of individuals share so much with the exception of the sex chromosomes - it becomes more reasonable to do an actual comparison. (I am aware there is still lots of room for genetic variation from the rest of the father's somatic set) I don't know how scientific it would be, but as a thought experiment, I wasn't to concerned about it at the time I posted it.
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One wonders what would happen with child support payments if the two sperms came from a different father. I doubt the rules and regulations know how to deal with that one.
This is the least of these kids problems. One of the kids has genitals which are in between penis and vagina. Both have inconsistent genetic makeup which is bound to cause health or at least fertility issues. Imagine living a life where you are called "a very special and wonderful person", but no personal life or even ability to enter either public restroom without people looking at you dubiously.