A Washington State man failed a paternity test after doctors revealed his twin was the father of his child … but there"s a big, unusual twist:
His twin was never born.
It sounds like a sci-fi plot, but the 34-year-old thus made history as the first ever case of a paternity test being fooled by a human chimera.
Translation: Someone with extra genes absorbed from a twin lost in early pregnancy; He absorbed DNA from his brother, who died in the womb.
It"s not clear at what point the fetus lost viability, but as many as one in eight single child births are believed to start as multiple pregnancies.
Occasionally, cells from the miscarried siblings are sometimes absorbed in the womb by a surviving twin. Which is what happened here.
The Washington couple took a paternity test after their son’s blood type didn’t match either parent. Understandably, they were alarmed.
After having a child with the help of fertility clinic procedures, they feared that sperm donors may have potentially been mixed up.
After the initial failed fertility test, they took a genetic ancestry test which suggested that the man was actually his son’s uncle.
The father’s sperm was found to have 10 percent of a genetic match to the infant, a discovery that led to the following conclusion:
The genes in his sperm were different to that in his saliva and it was concluded that the father is effectively the man’s own unborn twin.
Searches for chimeras are incredibly complicated, to say the least, as the genes only feature in detectable amounts in very few organs.
Yet more people turn to fertility clinics to have children, chimerism may become more common, as more multiple births are recorded.
