TY - JOUR
T1 - Identical twins carry a persistent epigenetic signature of early genome programming
AU - van Dongen, Jenny
AU - Gordon, Scott D.
AU - McRae, Allan F.
AU - Odintsova, Veronika V.
AU - Mbarek, Hamdi
AU - Breeze, Charles E.
AU - Sugden, Karen
AU - Lundgren, Sara
AU - Hannon, Eilis
AU - Moffitt, Terrie E.
AU - Hagenbeek, Fiona A.
AU - van Beijsterveldt, Catharina E.M.
AU - Jan Hottenga, Jouke
AU - Tsai, Pei Chien
AU - McRae, Allan F.
AU - Castillo-Fernandez, Juan E.
AU - de Geus, Eco J.C.
AU - Spector, Timothy D.
AU - Min, Josine L.
AU - Hemani, Gibran
AU - Ehli, Erik A.
AU - Paul, Franziska
AU - Stern, Claudio D.
AU - Heijmans, Bastiaan T.
AU - Slagboom, P. Eline
AU - Daxinger, Lucia
AU - van der Maarel, Silvère M.
AU - Willemsen, Gonneke
AU - Montgomery, Grant W.
AU - Reversade, Bruno
AU - Ollikainen, Miina
AU - Kaprio, Jaakko
AU - Bell, Jordana T.
AU - Mill, Jonathan
AU - Caspi, Avshalom
AU - Martin, Nicholas G.
AU - Boomsma, Dorret I.
AU - Genetics of DNA Methylation Consortium
AU - BIOS Consortium
N1 - Funding Information:
We acknowledge funding from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO): Biobanking and Biomolecular Research Infrastructure (BBMRI–NL, 184.021.007; 184.033.111), and NWO Large Scale infrastructures, X-Omics (184.034.019). Cohort-specific acknowledgments are provided in Supplementary Note 8. We thank Peter Visscher and Jian Yang for their helpful comments.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s).
PY - 2021/9/28
Y1 - 2021/9/28
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41467-021-25583-7
DO - 10.1038/s41467-021-25583-7
M3 - Article
C2 - 34584077
SN - 2041-1723
VL - 12
SP - 1
EP - 14
JO - Nature Communications
JF - Nature Communications
IS - 1
M1 - 5618
ER -
