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. 2015 Aug 28;37(10):1106–1118. doi: 10.1002/bies.201500059

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© 2015 The Authors. BioEssays Published by WILEY Periodicals, Inc.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

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Pedigree of microchimerism. Microchimerism is a bidirectional exchange of fetal and maternal cells during pregnancy. During pregnancy, fetal cells (represented as orange and green circles) traffic into the maternal body, increasing in quantity throughout the gestational period. Likewise, each fetus inherits maternally derived cells (represented as purple circles). It has been predicted that younger siblings could also obtain older siblings' cells 15, as depicted with offspring 1 cells (orange) circulating within the younger sibling's body (offspring 2).