How to be both the biological father and the uncle of your son. This mystery called “chimera” challenged the entire scientific community recently in the United States.
In the United States, a man has just discovered that he is the father but also the uncle of his son! In this fascinating story told by the IFLscience website, it all begins when an American couple struggles to conceive their second child. He decides to use the service of a clinic specializing in medically assisted procreation.
Until then, that’s good news. After in vitro fertilization and artificial insemination, this man’s wife becomes pregnant. Nine months later, she gave birth to a healthy baby boy. Except that the doctors realize that this child does not share any of the blood types of his parents. Something abnormal for those doctors who know how to check for blood group parentage (Source: EXPERTADN.FR).
A chimera
Because of these suspicions, a first paternity test is carried out. And the results are final, the man is not the father of the child. It is after the third paternity test that practitioners discover that the man is in fact the child’s uncle.
Against all expectations, extensive checks have indeed shown that at the very beginning of his life in utero, the child’s father had a twin. However, this embryo would not have developed, and was even taken up by the only viable organism which is that of its brother.
In the end, this mutation that occurred during the first days of pregnancy went completely unnoticed until the genetic material of this twin resurfaced years later.
Faced with this unprecedented story, American scientists conclude that the baby’s father now has two DNAs, his own and that of his twin brother, transmitted at the time of the conception of his son.
A very rare phenomenon but known to geneticists under the name of “chimera”, reports the site SciencePost, which even relays an infographic to explain it.
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