DNA Doppelgängers

Have you ever caught sight of someone and thought it was you? New research shows us that if you do then that person is more than likely carrying a lot of the same gene combinations that you have.

Scientists have found a link between the DNA of doppelgängers. They found that unrelated people that look very alike shared some DNA characteristics beyond the normal sharing beyond strangers.

I can hear you thinking “Well they would wouldn’t they?” I mean, I had that thought too. It feels like it stands to reason that two people who look very alike will share some genetic similarities but until this recent research no one had bothered to check.

The research was undertaken by the Leukaemia Research Institute in Barcelona and was written up in the scientific publication Cell Reports. What’s even more interesting is that the scientific investigation was inspired by a photography project, yes art!

Canadian photographer, François Brunelle, became fascinated with people who looked alike after he was told time and time again that he was the spitting image of Mr. Bean, the British comedian and actor Roman Atkinson. In 1999 he started to find people who looked very similar but weren’t related to each other and photograph them together. He pursued this project for years and had gathered the portraits of over two hundred and fifty lookalikes by 2015. The people, the doppelgängers, came from all over the world and Brunelle started to show the photographs in exhibitions and many of them are now on his Instagram page and on his website.

Here is his Instagram page:

In a press release of the 23rd of August 2022 the leader of the scientific team undertaking the research, Dr Manel Esteller, said:

“For decades, the existence of individuals who resemble each other without having any family ties has been described as a proven fact, but only in anecdotal terms and without any scientific justification, the widespread use of the internet and social networks for image-sharing has meant that we are now able to identify and study such people.”

And that’s just what Dr Esteller and his team from the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute did. The team used photographer François Brunelle’s photographs to identify 32 pairs of people who looked very much alike and invited them to fill in a detailed questionnaire about their lifestyles and to give biometric details. They also each gave a sample of spit, saliva that was then used to obtain their DNA which was analysed by them for any similarities.

The photographs of the faces of the subjects were put through several different facial recognition programmes and they found that 75% of the couples had a facial recognition similar to that found by humans in twins. The team narrowed the research down further by picking out the sixteen pairs that had the most similarities. These sixteen were investigated further.

The DNA findings showed a very close correlation between genetic characteristics of the two unrelated people in each pair. What everyone thought might be true, that doppelgängers really did share similar DNA was now proven.

So what? Well Dr Estler feels it opens up doors for future investigations and may open up new opportunities in forensic science and biomedicine. Dr Estler says in the press release:

“It would be very interesting to follow up the potential application in forensics, using the genome of unknown people to prepare bioinformatic strategies to reconstruct the face from DNA”

Because the world’s population has grown so large there is an increasing chance that you too have a doppelgänger somewhere out in the world. The world’s population is now more than 7.9 billion and there are only so many combinations of genes possible and so lookalike repetitions of genes are more likely to occur.

As to the photographer, François Brunelle, he has probably met, spoken to and photographed more doppelgängers than anyone else in the world and this has given him a deep insight into what it feels like to meet not yourself but someone who might pass for you if the lighting and circumstances were correct. Brunelle himself started the project after being told time after time that he looked like someone else (Mr. Bean) and it became his beautiful obsession. Little did he know that his wonderful photographs would lead to a full blown scientific investigation into the genetics of lookalikes. Here he is speaking about the project as part of a TedX talk: