[Leftism is Mentally Deranged]

What the article says is the they DO have identical DNA, but that changes can develop soon after fertilization. Another case of the headline being written by an brain-deficient moron.

[punster]

What happens, is every time the cells divide, there are changes occurring. In other words, the succeeding generation of cells is not quite identical to the original cell. It can certainly make for some interesting differences in characteristics of a set of monozygotic twins, while there are still a lot of similarities.

[Jedi Master Pikachu]

Technically, the headline is accurate by your reasoning (that they *do* have identical DNA), stating that twins have identical DNA.

There is only a suggestion that this isn't the case (which is the case for some, and if all the cells in a twin are taken into account, not only the first one).

[allmendream]

Well their DNA is the same, but its MODIFICATION pattern is different! The DNA sequence is identical, but they end up getting methylated at different positions, which changes gene expression.

So their DNA is the same.....but different.

[AmericanVictory]

Good point. And they sure do change into different beings as they grow older and things happen to them.

[ChessExpert]

I followed the link to the NYTimes (something I hated to do). The last two paragraphs read:


THE BOTTOM LINE

Identical twins apparently do not have identical DNA.

[neverdem]

What the article says is the they DO have identical DNA, but that changes can develop soon after fertilization. Another case of the headline being written by an brain-deficient moron.

No, check the link in comment# 1 and the keywords copynumbervariation, copynumbervariations and cnv. In the case of twins, copy-number variation means that the twins can have zero to multiple copies of the same gene.