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Besties Share DNA Similarities: Study

Besties Share DNA Similarities
(Photo : Flickr) Besties Share DNA Similarities

People who are friends are genetically similar, finds a study.

It is known that we choose people having similar interests, goals and personality traits irrespective of age, ethnicity and socio-economic background as friends to stand by us through thick and thin. Experts at the Yale University discovered similarities in DNA codes of people who are friends than strangers. They analyzed over 467,000 genetic sequences of about 2,000 participants from a health study in Framingham, Massachusetts. The study group comprised of 1,367 people who remained close friends from 1970 through 2000 and were not biologically related, reports the Belfast Telegraph.

They observed vast resemblance in DNA codes between friends than in strangers. The study also noted the genes influencing the sense of smell were mostly alike in friends. The genetic relation between best friends was close to the similarities shared by a person with his fourth cousin or a great-great-great grandfather. This means that these participants had one percent of common human genomes.

"Most people don't even know who their fourth cousins are, yet we are somehow, among a myriad of possibilities, managing to select as friends the people who resemble our kin, "Nicholas Christakis, study author and a social scientist at Yale University, told the Live Science News.

The authors have not been able to identify the exact reasons for people to have eugenic resemblance with their pals. They postulate that our genes push us to look for an appropriate surrounding where we are most likely to meet our friends.

In addition, traits and skills developed  over time as evolution made humans go searching for companions who were identical in many aspects. The current results help explain how certain behaviors like altruism grew along with the evolutionary phase. However, the authors believe their research had certain limitations like participants with similar ethnic backgrounds who may have inherited similar set of genes and attributes that were conditioned by same kind of upbringing and living environment.

More information is available online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Jul 15, 2014 10:44 AM EDT By

MD News Daily

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