Mix-and-Match Man

"I believe you have what we dermatologists call 'combination skin'."

"You're gonna feel a little pinch, maybe some discomfort around the neck area. But don't worry. When you wake up, you'll have the body of a seventeen-year-old. In fact, you'll have the body of several."

— Eric, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Some Assembly Required"

This is an Artificial Human, usually but not always a clone, who is created from the combined DNA of multiple individuals. Sometimes the intent was to clone a single individual exactly, but extra genetic samples were added to the mix by accident. Other times, this is done on purpose to give the clone specific traits from each genetic donor.

Non-clone Mix-and-Match Men are physically built from parts of other people, literally stitched together.

Can be Half Human Hybrids when at least one genetic donor is human and at least one isn't. Can be Mix-and-Match Critters when all genetic donors are non-humans, such as Human Aliens. Both Half-Human Hybrid and Mix-and-Match Critter examples of this trope occur when there is more than one species among the genetic donors. Obviously more likely to occur in settings where Designer Babies are common. LEGO Genetics are a prerequisite for making these out of vastly different species. Patchwork Kids is when an individual produced by normal reproduction might as well be one of these, and Extra Parent Conception is a variation of this trope where this occurs as part of a normal conception (or as normal as it gets for that particular species). Can overlap with Two-Donor Clone, which is when clones are created from two or more sources of genetic material.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Appleseed, the Bioroids were created with DNA from several donors, including the father of heroine Deunan.
• Fabricant 100: Fabricants can be identified by the stitches on their bodies that come from their Frankenstien-like creation. It's not helped by them continuing to upgrade their body parts.
• Dragon Ball: Cell is made of the cells of at least five different humans from three different races. He's made of one Namekian (Piccolo), two Saiyans (Goku and Vegeta), and two from Freeza's race (Freeza and Great King Cold). The anime seems to have added some Earthling cells into the mix. The result is a tall creature with bug and lizard attributes, whose growth process is based on metamorphosis.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • While he's not a clone of anyone in particular, the strange circumstances around Giorno Giovanna's conception gave him characteristics of both Jonathan Joestar and Dio Brando. This is reflected in his name: JoJo + Dio = GioGio. It turns out that there's three other men created from these same circumstances — they appear in Part 6.
  • Part 8's Josuke is the result of the mix between two men, Yoshikage Kira and Josefumi Kujo. The two were buried near the Wall Eyes, where the soil caused an exchange between the two bodies. Josuke's Stand powers are a mixture of the two's own Stands, and Josuke has traits taken from both.
• Kirito Kamui from Psycho-Pass turns out to be this. He's got the parts of 184 other people grafted into him, and as a collective he became immune to the Sibyl System, which analyses Crime Coefficients on an individual basis.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: Rei is formed from the DNA of Yui Ikari and the angel Lilith.
• One Piece: The Seraphim are made of the DNA, blood and powers of three to four people. They are cloned from the people who held the title of the Seven Warlords of the Sea at the start of the series, they're partly made out of King's Lunarian DNA which gave them Lunarian attributes, they're equipped with Kizaru's Glint-Glint laser power which they can fire from their palms, and they're also infused with green blood from Devil Fruit users which gives them the same powers as the original blood owner. While S-Snake and S-Bear got their green blood from the people they're cloned from, S-Shark and S-Hawk got their green blood from other people.
• Tenchi Muyo!:
  • Ryoko was made by Washu, then a genetic researcher for the Jurai, hoping to create the daughter she could never have (and that could never be taken away from her like her son had been, sadly it did not work out that way), mixed her own genes with genes from a microbe she'd been studying.
  • In the film, Daughter of Darkness, the Big Bad creates an artificial daughter for Tenchi using DNA from his hair and one of her own.
• In UQ Holder!, Touta Konoe is strongly implied to be one of these, being the result of a genetic experiment meant to combine Negi Springfield's enormous magical power with Asuna's Anti-Magic.

Comic Books

• The DCU:
  • Damage is somewhere between this trope and Designer Babies; his genes were taken from all the original Justice Society of America.
  • In Superboy (1994), Conner Kent/Kon-El is a mix of Superman and Lex Luthor. This was decidedly not the original intention, but when a fan named Geoff Johns became the book's writer...
  • It's implied that the New 52 version of Conner isn't just Kryptonian and human, but a mix of other alien species. According to Harvest in #19, he's "the product of three unique genetic strands". Two of these are Superman and Lois Lane. The third being the son of an alternate Clark and Lois.
  • Depending which version you're talking about, the Composite Superman has the combined powers of Superman and Batman plus some Justice League of America folks, or the combined powers of a buttload of Legion of Super-Heroes members.
  • The Silver Age hero Ultra, The Multi-Alien was a man (in the future) who was a victim of four alien criminals trying to create a means to replicate armies of themselves to conquer the universe. He ended up with a freaky composite body and each of the aliens' powers, which he then used to become a superhero. (He later finds a way to switch back-and-forth between human and multi-form.)
• Brianna from Gold Digger was created with the traits and memories of her two "sisters" in a Freak Lab Accident.
• Marvel Universe:
  • Deadpool probably counts, but he was a normal human before the Mix-and-Match.
  • X-23 is a relatively mild case of this, being primarily an Opposite-Sex Clone of Wolverine, but because the DNA sample used was damaged, they had to double up on the X chromosome, resulting in her being female. Some stories also try to Hand Wave Laura's resemblance to Dr. Sarah Kinney, the woman who carried her to term but was otherwise not related to her, by saying that Sarah used some of her own DNA in the stabilization process, which would give Laura genetic parents in the form of Logan's mother and father and Sarah.
  • X-Men villain Mr. Sinister, being an Evilutionary Biologist, is fond of cataloguing stolen DNA to splice together and create the Ultimate Life Form. One of his notable products Xraven the Hunter, a clone of Kraven spliced with the powers of the first five X-Men with some biomass from Carnage to help stitch the whole thing together.

Fan Works

• We Are All Pokémon Trainers: School creations aren't born in the conventional sense, they're derived from numerous genetic sources from two or more people that are made into a template, and then formed from a machine that creates them from raw materials. Chiyo, an escaped Schoolchild, mentions that in a way their creation method gives them more in common with homunculi than conventional clones.

Film — Live-Action

• The Big Bad of Battle Beyond the Stars, Sador of the Malmori, plans to live forever this way, using his torture-surgeon to sever limbs of enemies or incompetent henchman. It backfires when a member of a Hive Mind gets Captured on Purpose and his hand is implanted on Sador, only the rest of the Hive Mind is still controlling the hand and tries to cut Sador's throat, who's only saved by the surgeon chainsawing off the limb on the spot.
  Kalo: Remember Bilko? He disobeyed orders, and now Lord Sador's wearing his foot.
• The protagonist of The Fly (1986) kidnapped his pregnant love interest in an attempt to merge himself, her, and their unborn child into this trope. It's unclear if this could possibly have worked, but at the time he was so desperate to suppress his transformation into a human/fly hybrid that he wasn't thinking straight.
• In The Fly II, Seth's child has grown up, and reverses his own transformation by using his father's teleporter to steal human genetic material from the Corrupt Corporate Executive who'd raised him as an unwitting laboratory experiment, replacing his hereditary fly genes with human ones.
• The reason why the title villain in Monster Man is killing and amputating people is because he needs bodyparts to patch up his resurrected brother.
• "Lazarus" from Mr. Stitch is a sort of Frankenstein's Monster made from the corpses of eighty-eight people of every race, age and lifestyle, split evenly among gender and given an identity of his own. Things go wrong when it turns out he has Genetic Memory.
• The protagonist of Patchwork is the result of three different girls being stitched into one body.
• The creations in Scream and Scream Again are a physically superior master race of humans built by a Mad Doctor from limbs, organs, and miscellaneous body parts harvested from unwilling patients.
• Julius and Vincent Benedict from Twins (1988) are Designer Babies with combined DNA from six athletic and scholarly fathers, though the traits were obviously not distributed fairly.
• Sid 6.7 from Virtuosity is sort of like this — he was a computer program created from the personalities of 183 criminals (and an orchestra director), which tricked a programmer into placing him in an android body so he could do damage in the real world.
• The version of Deadpool used in X-Men Origins: Wolverine fits the trope even more so than his comics counterpart, having Wolverine's regeneration, adamantium skeleton, and adamantium katanas protruding from each wrist, in addition to Cyclops's Eye Beams, Kestrel's Teleportation, and his own superhuman hand-eye-coordination.

Literature

Examples by author:

• Robert A. Heinlein:
  • The title character of Friday was designed with the genes of Dr. Baldwin and many of his friends and fellow agents.
  • Minerva's Wetware Body in Time Enough for Love is a synthetic clone combining one chromosome pair each from twenty-three parents, including Lazarus.
  • Also Minerva's twin sister, Pallas Athena, who finally gets a body with the exact same DNA as Minerva in To Sail Beyond the Sunset.

Examples by title:

• In Animorphs, Ax's human form is one of these. He took DNA from four of the other Animorphs to create his human form, so he wouldn't look like a copy of anybody. He's Ambiguously Brown due to mixing genes from Jake and Rachel (white), Marco (at least half Hispanic) and Cassie (black); he's also described as "disturbingly pretty," which characters attribute to half of his DNA coming from girls. (This seems to ignore the fact that EVERYBODY has half-female DNA, but whatever.)
• The Igors in Discworld typically have parts from multiple people, and can replace someone else's missing parts as well. (There is also a mention of a Mix-and-Match Horse in Going Postal, as well as Thcrapth the dog from Carpe Jugulum and Patcheth the cat in the 2015 Discworld Diary.)
• In Moffitt's Genesis series, all humans created by the Nar use this as their preferred reproductive method, as the human gene pool is still too limited to allow random breeding.
• Flinx from the Humanx Commonwealth series was conceived via this trope by criminal scientists, who spliced together DNA from dozens of psychically inclined sources.
• The title character of the Known Space story The Patchwork Girl qualifies as the second type. The widespread use of organ banks, Organ Theft, and capital punishment by disassembly for organs in the setting results in many people technically fitting this trope to some extent. She becomes a Patchwork Girl after being partly disassembled for spare parts due to an emergency after being found guilty of a capital crime, then being reassembled from other spare parts when she's cleared of the crime.
• Invoked from an alien POV in Perdido Street Station when an insect-headed khepri describes humans as "khepri bodies with the heads of shaved apes".
• Stanisław Lem's Przekładaniec explores this: in traffic accidents, doctors aim to save as many lives as possible, even if this results in having to mix working part of people (or even animals).
• The Replica (Marilyn Kaye) series of novels has one of these as the main character, created deliberately to be an Übermensch.
• In Vonda N. McIntyre's sci-fi novella Screwtop, one of the inmates of a prison camp is a mixed-race human "tetraparental", which means his genes have been spliced together from four parents, resulting in black-and-beige marbled skin and patches of black and blond hair of different textures.
• Damsel in Soon I Will Be Invincible is a mix of human and alien DNA. She suffers from medical problems from the incompatible systems working against each other.
• Darci, the protagonist of the sci-fi novel Star Split, is eventually revealed to be a chimera, or someone made of multiple strands of DNA. This itself isn't unusual in the far future world where genetic engineering is the norm, but she's a special case.
• Takeshi Kovacs: The Patchwork Man is an in-universe urban legend on Harlan's World, the story goes that a witch killed her three lazy sons, stitched their bodies together, and summoned a Tengu to possess the amalgamation. Eventually it escaped but needed to find replacement parts as they rotted, so it stalks the alleys looking for children to use for parts. Kovacs uses the story as a metaphor for frequent re-sleeving and the toll it takes on one's self-identity.
• In Unwind, Cameron is made entirely from parts harvested from other teenagers, including his brain. He's called a "Rewind", as opposed to the "Unwinds" who lost their lives to create him. He finds out that his creators don't intend him to be the last. He's meant to be the first in a line of Rewinds, to be used as child soldiers.

Live-Action TV

• Adam from Season 4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was an amalgam of several of the monsters that the Initiative had captured (plus a deceased human soldier) and was taken out by an amalgam of the main characters.
  Spike: So I help you, and you get this chip out of my head?
  Adam: Scout's honor.
  Spike: You were a boy scout?
  Adam: Parts of me.
• The Criminal Minds episode "There's No Place Like Home" has an UnSub attempting to bring his brother back to life by building him a new body out of parts from murdered boys. Obviously, nothing comes of it.
• All the transgenics from Dark Angel have DNA culled from various humans and animals (which animal depends on the type; for example, X5s are part feline) so that they have peak physical and mental abilities. As far as is known, none looks exactly like any human donor.
• Doctor Who:
  • Morbius' second body, being a tribute to Frankenstein's monster.
  • "Journey's End": "Handy"/the Metacrisis Doctor, a Tenth Doctor clone with some of Donna's DNA.
  • "Auntie" and "Uncle" from "The Doctor's Wife" are kept alive with parts from murdered Time Lords.
  • Nardole is a Human Alien whose body has been "rebuilt" at least once; this includes various robot parts and human lungs. He also mentions that his current left hand isn't the original — he won it in a game at some point.
• In the third season of Haven, Audrey suspects that the Bolt Gun Killer is collecting his victims' body parts in order to build a Mix-And-Match Woman. The killer is actually a Skinwalker and building a customized suit.
• House has a patient like this. A boy has a few groups of cells throughout his body that are the result of two fertilized eggs fusing together immediately after fusing to the uterine wall.
• Power Rangers Dino Charge has Curio, who was created from spare monster parts to be friends with Poisandra.
• Luke Smith from The Sarah Jane Adventures has the combined intelligence and genetic information culled from thousands of human specimens.
• Star Trek:
  • It's implied that Mr. Spock of Star Trek: The Original Series was conceived in this way. The Expanded Universe novels outright say he was, but as always, there are Canon issues with those.
  • The Vidians on Star Trek: Voyager are a race of these. A plague has swept through their entire species, forcing them to cannibalize parts from other aliens. The disease adapts so quickly that the Vidians can never stop looking for new parts.
  • Star Trek: Enterprise has baby Elizabeth, created from human and Vulcan DNA with a fatal flaw deliberately introduced by a hate group to make her a Straw Loser of a particularly heartbreaking kind.
• In Tokumei Sentai Go Busters, it's eventually revealed that Messiah created his Co-Dragons, Enter and Escape, from data on physical characteristics and personality traits that he got from the scientists that were beamed into Hyperspace with him.

Multiple Media

• Dragon Ball:
  • Cell from Dragon Ball Z. As the name suggests, he was created from the DNA of the strongest fighters to ever set foot on Earth. Which gives him the best traits of humans, Namekians, Saiyans, and... whatever Freeza's race is called.
  • Android 21, the new character of tie-in game Dragon Ball Fighter Z, is revealed to be a similar genetically engineered lifeform, being a human woman augmented with Cell's collective DNA, plus further augmented with DNA taken from countless Warriors and Researchers including Majin Buu, Cell himself, as well as possibly the other Z Fighters who weren't included in Cell and maybe even the Supreme Kai or Kibito, Dabura based on when one confirmed sample woudld have been obtained or possible even Beerus and Whis based on the shape of of Android 21's tail. Not to mention that it's possible that her individual samples were taken from a point in time where the donors were stronger than they were when they were taken for Cell.
• In pretty much every iteration of the Frankenstein franchise (the 1931 movie, Young Frankenstein, etc.), Frankenstein's Monster is made up of various spare parts from corpses. The Dean Koontz version goes so far as to identify what sort of people his parts came from. The novel gives almost no details about its creation.
• Serpentor from G.I. Joe was created from the combined DNA of twelve historical figures: Julius Caesar, Napoléon Bonaparte, Attila the Hun, Philip II of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Vlad the Impaler, Hannibal, Genghis Khan, Montazuma, Aemon Talk, and Grigori Rasputin. Dr. Mindbender tried to get Sun Tzu as well, but was stopped by the Joes. Fortunately, that was apparently enough to throw his military competence out of whack. G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (Marvel) justifies all this by stating that the DNA is largely symbolic — Serpentor's mind and memories are created by Dr. Venom's brainwashing machine.

Pinball

• Appropriately enough, the Creature in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is this, complete with big, visible scars.

Tabletop Games

• The Discworld Roleplaying Game features the "Patchwork Man" advantage, primarily so it can handle the Discworld novels' Igors.
• Patchwork in GURPS Supers: International Super Teams is a Frankenstein monster made from multiple metahumans. A thoughtful and philosophical being, he spends a lot of time wondering if he has a soul... and if so, whose?
• Magic: The Gathering:
  • Goblin Chirurgeon's art depicts one of his patients, who appears to include bits of at least four humanoid species.
  • Phyrexians, who do this... and a bunch of other Body Horror. Phyrexian Rebirth turns all creatures in play into this.
  • Innistrad uses this as the distinction between black zombies, which apply the rotting-reanimated-corpse model, and blue zombies, which are the product of blasphemous Frankenstein-style experimentation rather than blasphemous rituals.
• In Promethean: The Created, all Frankensteins are made from pieces of at least two separate corpses. It's in the name — the first one was that Frankenstein's Monster. Theoretically, any Promethean can be a mix-and-match, but a Frankenstein has to be.

Video Games

• Dragon Age II has a subplot about a Serial Killer who is trying to build a Mix-And-Match Woman to replace his lost love. He eventually kills the protagonist's mother and uses her face for his creation.
• Agent 47 from Hitman has Austrian, Chinese, Colombian, German and Kazakh fathers.
• Kingdom Hearts: Xion was created as a replica of Sora and wields the Kingdom Key as her personal Keyblade. However, since Sora's heart is tied to many, she inherits not only his traits but also people close to him. Her default form is Kairi with black hair, because she was mostly based off of Sora's memories of Kairi. She is sometimes seen as Riku in dreams, and when her heart joins Roxas upon her defeat, the latter ends up gaining the ability to dual wield Oathkeeper and Oblivion, Keyblades that originally represented Sora's relationship with Kairi and Riku, respectively. Meanwhile, Xigbar sees her as Ventus, whose heart resides in Sora.
• Metal Gear: Liquid and Solid Snake (being twins) are confirmed to be part-American (their main DNA donor being Big Boss) and part-Japanese (mitochondrial DNA from the Japanese woman who donated the eggs). They also inherit some from EVA, who was their surrogate mother.
• A non-genetic example is Ermac from Mortal Kombat, who is made up of the souls of hundreds of dead warriors bound into a humanoid body.
• Emerl from Sonic Battle is designed to combine the movesets and personalities of the people he meets. When the only people he's met are Sonic and Tails, others can't tell if he's being rude or polite.

Webcomics

• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja's arc "Why a Gorilla?" has the Doctor face off against a three headed 4 armed Gorilla "Frankenstein".
• Quilt from Dominic Deegan is a Flesh Golem made from the pieces of a bunch of mages in an attempt to create a golem with their combined powers. It didn't work as intended.
• Drowtales: Rik the half-dragon is something of a genetic experiment, and is ostracized by a society as a result.
• Grace from El Goonish Shive is human and also part squirrel, with alien DNA from an Uryuom and a Lespuko (sort of like an Uryuom, long story).
• Baron Wulfenbach from Girl Genius is probably one of these. The family originally had three sons, but following a horrific lab accident two of them disappeared. It's commonly believed that the Baron is a construct made of the salvageable parts of all three. Even more explicitly, Agatha's foster parents Adam and Lilith, AKA Punch and Judy.
• Homestuck: The four main protagonists are all examples, all being made from the combined DNA of their guardians.
• Molly in The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! was grown using genetic material from many different animals—and some human DNA, taken from her "mother", Jean Poule.
• Nicole from Quantum Vibe is an "osmotic clone" created from the genes of her mother and eleven anonymous donors. Her mom intended to use genes from 2400 people but couldn't get a viable fetus until Seamus (one of the donors and Nicole's employer) suggested using whole chromosomes instead of pieces of them.
• Unity of Skin Horse is sewn together Frankenstein-style from mismatched parts. It's later revealed that Unity is actually a nanomachine swarm inhabiting a Frankenstein body because it was designed not to reject her. She can possess other bodies, but only temporarily.

Web Originals

• Count Driscol, Captain Cedric and Bernard the Guard in Dragomir's Diary were all originally separate people. But when all three were killed (two of them torn in half!), they were secured by a Mad Doctor and cobbled together into a single, hideous creature. (Which, to be fair, can still split into three individuals, and even when they're together the three heads retain their distinct personalities.)
• Gordon of Twig describes himself as a "chimera", a stitched-together child made from approximately twenty-six different people in order to give him the best body possible. He experiences severe phantom pain episodes when his body tries to reject its own limbs.
• In Worm, Blasto is apparently capable of creating these, and he attempts to make one out of Myrddin and the Simurgh. Luckily, he fails; the result is nonviable due to the Simurgh's lack of conventional biology.

Western Animation

• In the Adventure Time episode "Princess Monster Wife", the Ice King gives up on kidnapping princesses... and instead just steals a bit from a bunch of them, stitching them together into a horrific-looking female abomination, the episode's titular Princess Monster Wife. Their relationship is oddly sweet, but she is so freakish that Finn and Jake are unable to fight her, and she is so distraught over her appearance (and origin, when she discovers it) that she pulls a Heroic Sacrifice by returning her parts to their original owners.
• The Batman: D.A.V.E. from the episode "Gotham's Ultimate Criminal Mastermind" is this with the brainwaves of Batman's Rogues Gallery, like Joker's acrobatic feats and Penguin's mastery of martial arts. He also has the brainwaves of Hugo Strange and Riddler, making him intelligent.
• The Bots Master: It's implied that many of the BOYZZ bots get their skills from the DNA/memories of famous and talented individuals. Batzz in particular is revealed to have the skills of many famous baseball stars.
  Larry: What are you?
  Batzz: Joe DiMaggio. Babe Ruth. Mickey Mantle. Ted Williams. [...] Ty Cobb. Reggie Jackson. Lou Gehrig. Carl Yastrzemski...
• Celebrity Deathmatch has the Super Freaks from Season 3, who are Artificial Humans created from the combined DNA of previous fighters on the show. Said freaks are Cousin Grimm (a Dumb Muscle redneck created from the combined DNA of Roseanne Barr, Bill Clinton, and Bigfoot), Pierce McCrack (a tattooed, skateboarding Delinquent created from the combined DNA of Trent Reznor, Dennis Rodman, and Keith Flint), Beni Trauma (a four-armed Chef of Iron created from the combined DNA of Emeril Lagasse and Jackie Chan), and Potato Khan (a small but hot-tempered potato-human hybrid created from the combined DNA of Joe Pesci, Genghis Khan, and a French fry that accidentally fell into the genetic mixture).
• Gargoyles:
  • Coldstone is a Cyborg whose "organic" (so to speak) parts came from three different gargoyles, and the body has all three souls fighting for control. Just to complicate matters, they're in a Love Triangle: a Happily Married couple and an evil male who wants the female for himself.
  • Delilah is a combination of Goliath's current and former love interests, Elisa Maza and Demona — and the point where her creator Thailog's oedipus complex officially becomes creepy.
  • Later still, Dr. Sevarius' creation Little Anton is a behemoth gargoyle created from the amalgamated genetic samples of the Manhattan Clan.
• Romy from the Pinky and the Brain episode "Brinky" was supposed to be a normal clone of Brain, but DNA from Pinky was accidentally included in his creation, causing him to inherit traits from both mice.
• The Rick and Morty episode "Ricksy Business" introduces Abradolf Lincler, a failed experiment by Rick to create a morally neutral super-leader by combining the DNA of Adolf Hitler and Abraham Lincoln. What he ended up being was an emotionally stunted, morally ambiguous jerk tormented by the duality of his being.
• Robot Chicken brings us the horror of Composite Santa: genetically/visually one-half Santa Claus, one-half Frosty the Snowman. Goku doesn't know what his powers are, "but he freaks me right the fuck out".
• This happens in The Secret Saturdays when Zak and his pet komodo dragon and gorilla-cat are combined into one being.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:
  • The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003) incarnation of the Rat King (a.k.a. "The Slayer") is made from DNA from Bishop and Splinter, among other possible sources.
  • In Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the turtles themselves turn out to have been created deliberately by using Mutagenic Goo to combine regular turtles with the DNA of a great human warrior, Lou Jitsu (a.k.a. Splinter).
• Superboy from Young Justice (2010) is a clone created from the DNA of Superman and Lex Luthor.

Real Life

• Chimera of this type can occur naturally when two embryo fuse in the womb. One case resulted in a woman whose apparent genome did not match her children's because her salivary glands and ovaries actually had two different genotypes.
  • Recently it's been shown that everyone has a slightly different version of Chimeraism occurring from cellular interchanges during pregnancy. Babies pick up a few from mom and mom from the child. However, these are very few.
• In addition to sexual reproduction blending the DNA of two individuals, much of our DNA is in fact viral in origin. These viruses began somewhere else, often in another species.
  • Probably most impressive is the DNA responsible for mitochondria, which are a necessary part of all multicellular organisms (and a fair bit of unicellular ones, too), and which is theorized to have its origins in some far prehistoric creature, now long-extinct on its own.
• Cloned animals are typically a Mix-and-Match of two parents: the animal from which they are cloned (which provides the nucleus of the lab-generated zygote), and the animal that provided an unfertilized egg (which provides the other cellular components). They have the chromosomes of their cloned parent, and the mitochondrial DNA — what little of it there is — of the egg-donor. Averted if the same female animal is used for both.

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