A recent study suggested that close friends can be expected to share the same amount of genes as fourth cousins.
The Washington Post reported that the study, which was published Monday, July 14, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, proposed that two friends would share genes as if they had the same great-great-great-grandparents.
“Looking across the whole genome, we find that, on average, we are genetically similar to our friends,” said James Fowler, lead researcher and professor of medical genetics at the University of California at San Diego. “We have more DNA in common with the people we pick as friends than we do with strangers in the same population.”
According to the Independent, the research studied about 2,000 people who already had their DNA analyzed because of a heart disease research. Fowler and co-researcher Nicholas Christakis of Yale University compared pairs of genes of the participants based on if they were friends or total strangers and analyzed how different or similar the individual’s genes in each pair.
They found that strangers were pretty different in terms of genes, but friends had the DNA similarity of about 1 percent, which is the same as a fourth cousin.
“One percent may not sound like much to the layperson, but to geneticists it is a significant number,” Christakis told the Daily Mail.
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