Doppelgängers don’t just look alike; people who appear nearly identical without being related are also astonishingly similar in their genetic makeup and often share lifestyle traits, a study published in Cell Reports finds.
“This shows a creative approach to finding similar sets of genes in people around the world,” Christopher Mason, a physiologist and biophysicist at Weill Cornell Medicine who was not involved in the study, writes in an email to The Scientist. “The methods were pretty standard in the field, but the application of them here was novel.”
Manel Esteller, a geneticist and cancer researcher at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute in Spain who led the new study, previously found that epigenetic changes are responsible for notable (though sometimes slight) differences in appearance in twins with the same genetic makeup. That got him wondering: “What about people who have the same face but are not related?”
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