Mysterious ways: Epigenetics and identical twins

January 23, 2009

JUST how identical are identical twins? That is the question Art Petronis at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto and his colleagues investigate in a paper just published in Nature Genetics. The answer is “not as identical as you might think”. Moreover, the differences may help to illuminate a process called epigenesis, which allows characteristics to be inherited in a way that is partly independent of the composition of their DNA. (The Economist)