In todays sciencey blog post, semi-identical twins. The twins are identical on their mothers side, but share only half their genes from the fathers side. This was caused by two sperm fertilising one egg. And how did science come to hear about this? Well one of the twins had ambiguous genitalia (I hear the cries of 'ahhh thats why he's blogging about this one') with both ovarian and testicular tissue - a true hermaphrodite! In a rather cool genetic aside, in each twin some cells contained two X chromosomes (ie female) and some contained XY (male) with the proportion varying between cell types.
oh and the kids appear of normal intelligence and are developing normally.
Reference can be found here.
Great stuff.
b
1 comment:
It would be most interesting to know how common chimerae are in broadcast spawning animals, where the incidence of polyspermy should be higher (things like sea urchins have quite slow polyspermy blocks).
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