China News Service, Beijing, January 8 (Reporter Sun Zifa) Springer Nature's professional academic journal "Nature-Genetics" recently published a genetics research paper saying that identical (single-egg) twins are in early embryonic development Genetic differences began to appear, which meant that the genomes of identical twins were not necessarily identical.
The paper states that identical twins come from a single zygote, which is formed after a sperm fertilizes an egg.
Cell division during embryonic development leads to mutations, but the source of this genetic difference in identical twins has never been measured before.
Hákon Jónsson of deCODE genetics/Amgen, Reykjavik, Iceland, and his colleagues sequenced the genomes of 387 pairs of identical twins and their parents, spouses, and children to track the divergence of variation .
They found that there were an average of 5.2 early developmental mutations between twins. About 15% of twins had a higher number of these mutations in one of them, while the other did not.
The author of the paper said that it is generally assumed that the genetic differences between identical twins are small, so the physiological or behavioral differences between the two are usually attributed to environmental factors.
However, autism and other developmental disorders may be affected by one in twins, which is related to genetic variation.
The authors of the paper concluded that the role of genetic factors in composing this phenotypic difference has been underestimated.
(Finish)