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The power of twin designs arises from the fact that twins may be either identical (monozygotic (MZ), i.e. developing from a single fertilized egg and therefore sharing all of their polymorphic alleles) or fraternal (dizygotic (DZ), i.e. developing from two fertilized eggs and therefore sharing on average 50% of their alleles, the same level of genetic similarity found in non-twin siblings).
The human twin birth rate in the United States rose 76% from 1980 through 2009, from 9.4 to 16.7 twin sets (18.8 to 33.3 twins) per 1,000 births. [5] The Yoruba people have the highest rate of twinning in the world, at 45–50 twin sets (90–100 twins) per 1,000 live births, [6] [7] [8] possibly because of high consumption of a specific type of yam containing a natural phytoestrogen which may ...
Thomas J. Bouchard Jr. (born October 3, 1937) is an American psychologist known for his behavioral genetics studies of twins raised apart. He is professor emeritus of psychology and director of the Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research at the University of Minnesota.
Twins were born between 1972 and 2000. [1] All twins born in Minnesota at that time were eligible to participate using birth registry data. Both identical and fraternal twins share certain aspects of their environment. This allows researchers to estimate the relative impact of environmental and genetic influences on phenotypes. The focus of the ...
The use of twins can improve the statistical power of a genetic study by reducing the amount of genetic and/or environmental variability. [1] " Identical twins" (monozygotic (MZ) twins) share virtually all their genes with each other, and "fraternal twins" (dizygotic (DZ) twins), on average, share about 50% of their genes with each other (about the same amount of sharing as non-twin siblings).
From 2011 till his death, Gottesman was a professor with an endowed chair in adult psychiatry and a senior fellow in psychology at the University of Minnesota; [9] a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Academy of Clinical Psychology, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford ...
A second and more common design is the twin study in which the similarity of identical and fraternal twins is used to estimate heritability. These studies can be limited by the fact that identical twins are not completely genetically identical, potentially resulting in an underestimation of heritability.
Falconer's formula is a mathematical formula that is used in twin studies to estimate the relative contribution of genetic vs. environmental factors to variation in a particular trait (that is, the heritability of the trait) based on the difference between twin correlations. [2]