Talking about Twin Study Deepens Multiple Sclerosis Mystery | Wired Science | Wired.com
Talking about Twin Study Deepens Multiple Sclerosis Mystery | Wired Science | Wired.com
Using extremely fine-grained analytical tools, scientists compared genetic information in three sets of identical twins. Of each pair, one twin had MS, and the other didn’t — yet their genes proved essentially identical.
“We find no smoking gun on the genetic level,” said National Center for Genome Resources geneticist Stephen Kingsmore, coauthor of the study published April 28 in Nature.
The research cost $1.5 million, and the scientists took 18 months to sequence 2.8 billion DNA units in each twin, and determine whether they came from the mother or father. Most genomic comparisons look for differences in a just handful of suspect gene, and even whole-genome approaches don’t differentiate between parental contributions.