Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: myths and mechanisms

By Edith Heard, R. Martienssen. Cell, 2014

1,612 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Since the human genome was sequenced, the term “epigenetics” is increasingly being associated with the hope that we are more than just the sum of our genes. Might what we eat, the air we breathe, or even the emotions we feel, influence not only our genes but those of descendents? The environment can certainly influence gene expression, and can lead to disease, but trans-generational consequences are another matter. While the inheritance of epigenetic characters can certainly occur - particularly in plants – how much is due to the environment and the extent to which it happens in humans, remains unclear.

Subfields: Molecular Biology, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/336134335b5029f60209370f503b94b147048b44

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Citations in the corpus

Genome Regulation by Polycomb and Trithorax: 70 Years and Counting. (2017, neutral): “In vertebrates, the mechanisms underlying transgenerational epigenetic inheritance are hotly debated (Blake and Watson, 2016; Heard and Martienssen, 2014; Hollick, 2017).”
Promoting Health and Longevity through Diet: from Model Organisms to Humans (2015, neutral): “The evidence for a role of epigenetic inheritance in these cases is largely correlational, and a direct experimental testing of the hypothesis is challenging (Heard and Martienssen, 2014; Rando, 2012).”
The extended evolutionary synthesis: its structure, assumptions and predictions (2015, background): “There is also increasing evidence for more stable transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, or the transmission across generations of cellular states without modification of the DNA sequence, which demonstrates that adaptive evolution may proceed by selection on epigenetic variants as well as variat”
SOX17 is a Critical Specifier of Human Primordial Germ Cell Fate (2014, background): “…and epigenome, together with the targets of SOX17 in hPGCLCs/hPGCs, should provide insights on the mechanism of how the epigenome is reset in the early human germline and potentially on the inheritance and consequences of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance (Heard and Martienssen, 2014).”
Biogenesis and function of tRNA fragments during sperm maturation and fertilization in mammals (2015, methodology): “As small RNAs are central to a broad range of epigenetic phenomena(5), we isolated cauda sperm from males consuming Control or Low Protein diet, and purified small ( 40nt) RNAs for analysis by deep sequencing.”
A Unique Gene Regulatory Network Resets the Human Germline Epigenome for Development (2015, background): “The comprehensive erasure of epigenetic modifications in the preimplantation embryo and the germline (Figure 7I) is apparently the major barrier to epigenetic inheritance in mammals (Heard and Martienssen, 2014).”