Do twins have identical DNA?

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

I am undergoing raging cognitive dissonance.

In Cecil’s (early?) 2001 masterpiece Do twins have identical DNA? a reader humbly approached the Master and said that $20 hung in the balance on DNA identification of who is who of identical twins. The answer from on-high was “yes.”

The matter was gone over again in Cafe Society, in DNA trickery - has this plot device ever been used in a crime story?, in which His column was cited.

The cause of my distress is this, from February 2013: Twins’ DNA hinders France sexual assault investigation. BBC cites somebody or other who should know that “ordinary” DNA analysis would not help, but some sort of further examination of a huge number of nucleotides may (or will, not clear) sort the two brothers out.

Of course, Cecil, writing in 2001, may have chosen not to use His foreknowledge of all things, in order not to spook His acolytes.

It would be nice to bump the CS thread, but my spirit tells me to lay my soul bare here.

Also I would feel bad if Paul Cunningham was incorrectly relieved of $20.

2

i vaguely remember some crime movie in which identical DNA is responsible for the locking up of the innocent twin, who doesn’t know he has an evil twin, so they lock him up, cos they find his DNA at the crime scene.

3

Not identical, but very similar.

[QUOTE=BBC News]
Police have been told it would cost upwards of 1m euros (£850,000) to conduct an ultra-sophisticated genetic test that would be able to tell one set of the twins’ DNA from the other.
[/quote]

Bullshit. More like $20,000.

http://www.genome.gov/sequencingcosts/

4

i buy that, cos on the cop shows they always go on about how the Dna is 80-90 percent similar, indicating a father or a brother, mother or sister.
so for siblings it must be even more similar

but one of the links i read that identical twins are identical in DNA :confused::confused:

5

I meant that I believe the BBC claim

and if the genome sequencing is so cheap now, it’s just more proof that America’s health care costs are kept artificially high.