Is your biological parent an identical twin? If so, you and your cousins might have a lot more in common than you realize. The children of identical twins are as genetically similar as a half-sibling would be.

Research on the children of identical twins

Like identical twins themselves, the children of identical twins provide researchers with great insight into how children develop. In fact, the University of Minnesota helps fun a “Children of Twins Study” to look at ” – like the twins themLike for their twin parents, there are many fascinating family relationships for the children of twins–when identical twins have children, their children are cousins but genetically as similar as half-siblings. The Children of Twins (CoT) study examines “psychopathology, psychosocial functioning, neurocognitive functioning, and brain structure and functioning in a sample of 176 substance-naïve children of twin parents…without a history of problematic substance use.”

According to their website, they are also “in the process of completing a neuroimaging assessment with the twin parents of children in the CoT study, which will yield the first (to our knowledge) comparable imaging assessment in twin parents and their children and will allow us to examine whether brain deviations associated with problematic substance use in adults are also observable in their young children prior to substance initiation.”

Twinning

Cousins whose parents are identical twins share will have 25% of their DNA in common (as opposed to 12.5%). (Full siblings share 50% of their DNA.)

In rare cases when sets of identical twins marry other sets of twins, their children are genetically full siblings. They’re called “quaternary twins” and are incredibly rare. Of course, a person’s environment and other causes of genetic mutation can change their phenotype (the expression of the genes).  WTF fun facts

Source: “Children of Twins (CoT) Study” — University of Minnesota, Family Cognitive Affective Neurodevelopment Lab

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