How Identical are Twins?
This article was originally written and submitted as part of a Canada 150 Project, the Innovation Storybook, to crowdsource stories of Canadian innovation with partners across Canada. The content has since been migrated to Ingenium’s Channel, a digital hub featuring curated content related to science, technology and innovation.
Using complete genome sequences of twins and parents, Western University’s Shiva Singh and colleagues established in 2011 that identical twins do not necessarily share identical DNA sequences. These results question the conclusions of more than 100 years of genetic research that had assumed the genomes of monozygotic twins to be 100 per cent identical.