News Snapshot:
A collection of photos of genetically unrelated lookalikes, along with DNA analysis, revealed that strong facial similarity is associated with shared genetic variants. The work appears August 23 in the journal Cell Reports. “Our study provides a rare insight into human likeness by showing that people with extreme lookalike faces share common genotypes, whereas they are discordant at the epigenome and microbiome levels,” says senior author Manel Esteller of the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain. “Genomics clusters them together, and the rest sets them apart.” The number of people identified online as virtual twins or doubles who...
