A mother of three has discovered she is not the biological parent of two of her naturally conceived sons and is in fact made up of two women, according to American scientists.
Scientists came to the extraordinary conclusion that the 52-year-old was formed from two non-identical twin girl embryos which fused into a single person in her mother's womb.
Tests carried out on the wo-man -- known as Jane -- showed she had two distinct types of DNA in her body. Her blood is made up of her own cells, but when doctors took samples from her thyroid gland, mouth and hair, they found they came from two different people.
Jane is a tetragametic chimera -- someone whose body is made up of two genetically different lines of cells. Her story, told in the New Scientist, is extremely rare and only 30 cases have been reported.
The disturbing discovery came when Jane needed to find a suitable donor for her kidney transplant. When her sons underwent blood tests to see if they could help their mother, the results showed that two of her boys could not be hers because they had different DNA.
Finally, a familial link was established with the boys when doctors tested Jane's brother and found he had similar genes to her sons. When Jane's ovaries were studied, it was found that the two different sets of genes in her body were living amicably alongside each other.
In 1998, doctors in Edinburgh reported a case of a chimeric baby which had been created from a fusion of male and female embryos. The child looked like a boy but had produced an ovary and fallopian tube on the left side of his reproductive system.
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