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Updated: Oct 18, 2025

Optimized Analysis of DNA Methylation and Gene Expression from Small, Anatomically-defined Areas of the Brain
Published on: July 12, 2012
Identical twins carry a persistent epigenetic signature of early genome programming
Jenny van Dongen1,2,3, Scott D Gordon4, Allan F McRae5
1Department of Biological Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. j.van.dongen@vu.nl.
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.
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