Identical twins carry a persistent epigenetic signature of early genome programming.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 34584077.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-021-25583-7 and PMC identifier 8479069.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Monozygotic (MZ) twins and higher-order multiples arise when a zygote splits during pre-implantation stages of development. The mechanisms underpinning this event have remained a mystery. Because MZ twinning rarely runs in families, the leading hypothesis is that it occurs at random. Here, we show that MZ twinning is strongly associated with a stable DNA methylation signature in adult somatic tissues. This signature spans regions near telomeres and centromeres, Polycomb-repressed regions and heterochromatin, genes involved in cell-adhesion, WNT signaling, cell fate, and putative human metastable epialleles. Our study also demonstrates a never-anticipated corollary: because identical twins keep a lifelong molecular signature, we can retrospectively diagnose if a person was conceived as monozygotic twin.
Medical subject headings
- DNA Methylation
- Epigenesis, Genetic
- Epigenomics
- Quantitative Trait Loci
- Twinning, Monozygotic
- Twins, Monozygotic