For a mother, having a child seems to be a sort of genetic crap shoot. Sometimes, the mother hits the jackpot (i.e. Lebron James). Other times, the mother is not so lucky (i.e. Eminem).But every once in a while, something truly unexpected happens and people are left scratching their heads.
Recently, a 52-year-old woman in Great Britain found out that she was genetically unrelated to her own two sons. How this was discovered is so unbelievable that it almost seems as though it came from an episode of the OC.
She was diagnosed with a chronic kidney disease and when it took a turn for the worse, she required a kidney transplant to survive.So logically, she turned to her immediate family to see if there was anyone who was a match. After testing immediate family, including her adult sons, the doctors found something shocking. Not only were her sons not a match, they were not even related to her. For this unenviable woman, it does not just rain or pour; these are meteor showers we're talking about.
There was no doubt that the men were her sons. She physically had given birth to them and their blood types matched. So a physical switch at birth was out of the question.
Scientists discovered this genetic paradox through white blood cell testing to determine if the woman could accept either of her son's kidneys, or if her immune system would reject it.The human lymphocyte antigen, a genetic marker that is carried on white blood cells, is tested in recipients and donors before transplant surgeries.When her HLA was tested against that of her sons, it was determined they were not a match. Additionally, it was determined that her sons had HLA genotypes that did not genetically match an inheritable type from their mother.
But if Michael Jackson can be related to Janet, then this too was possible. It was just a matter of determining how. So after Dr. Neng Yu and his colleagues ran a bunch of tests, they saw that this woman had several different copies of the HLA and that different copies were prevalent in different tissues in her body.
Under normal circumstances, this is not supposed to happen. The most likely explanation is that this woman was some sort of genetic mongrel, or, more technically a chimera.
The likely genetic explanation is that during her conception, there were two separate eggs fertilized by two sperm.This could sometimes lead to fraternal, or non-identical, twins, if both zygotes went on to mature. But in her case, somewhere early in development the two fertilized zygotes fused and became one person with DNA from two potential people mixed into one.
Sound kind of ridiculous?Well, apparently this sort of genetic mixing takes place more often than doctors and scientists had thought.
It is entirely possible that many people may have lived an entire lifetime without ever knowing that they lived with this genetically unique situation, or variations thereof.
Further understanding of the embryonic events that led to this complex genetic mixing could lead to very fruitful results. Knowledge of this genetic chimerism could be vastly beneficial for transplant surgery in terms of tissue acceptance. It could even lead to amazingly advanced genetic engineering.
Maybe one day soon we could all have little Lebrons.
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