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Chemical Senses Advance Access originally published online on September 14, 2005
Chemical Senses 2005 30(8):651-656; doi:10.1093/chemse/bji058
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© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org

Body Odor Similarity in Noncohabiting Twins

S. Craig Roberts1, L. Morris Gosling1, Tim D. Spector2, Paul Miller1, Dustin J. Penn3 and Marion Petrie1

1 School of Clinical Medical Sciences, University of Newcastle, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK, 2 Twin Research & Genetic Epidemiology Unit, St Thomas' Hospital, London, UK and 3 Konrad Lorenz Institute for Ethology, Vienna, Austria

Correspondence to be sent to: S. Craig Roberts, School of Biological Sciences, University of Liverpool, Crown Street, Liverpool L69 7ZB, UK. e-mail: craig.roberts{at}liverpool.ac.uk

There is currently considerable interest in biometric approaches using human odor as a marker of disease or genetic individuality. Body odor is also thought to be used during mate choice to select genetically compatible mates. The idea that body odor reveals information about both genetic identity and genetic similarity is most readily tested by examining odor in twin pairs. However, although this idea can be traced back 130 years to Francis Galton in 1875, most studies using dogs fail to control for shared environmental effects associated with cohabitation. Here we show that odors of identical twins (but not dizygotic twins) can be matched by human sniffers at rates better than chance, even when the twins are living apart. In addition, matching frequencies for identical twin odors were not significantly different from those for duplicate odors from the same individual. These results indicate an important genetic influence on body odor and the potential for developing technologies for human odor printing in relation to underlying genotype.

Key words: disassortative, monozygotic, odor, odour, olfaction, scent, smell


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[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]


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