Intergenerational epigenetic inheritance in reef-building corals
By Y. Liew, E. Howells, Xin Wang, Craig T. Michell, John A. Burt, Y. Idaghdour, M. Aranda. bioRxiv, 2018
143 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The perception that the inheritance of phenotypic traits operates solely through genetic means is slowly being eroded: epigenetic mechanisms have been shown to induce heritable changes in gene activity in plants 1 , 2 and metazoans 1 , 3 . Inheritance of DNA methylation patterns provides a potential pathway for environmentally induced phenotypes to contribute to evolution of species and populations 1 – 5 . However, in basal metazoans, it is unknown whether inheritance of CpG methylation patterns occurs across the genome (as in plants) or as rare exceptions (as in mammals) 4 . Here, we show that DNA methylation patterns in a reef-building coral are determined by genotype and developmental stage, as well as by parental environment. Transmission of CpG methylation from adults to their sperm and larvae demonstrates genome-wide inheritance. Variation in the hypermethylation of genes in adults and their sperm from distinct environments suggests intergenerational acclimatization to local temperature and salinity. Furthermore, genotype-independent adjustments of methylation levels in stress-related genes were strongly correlated with offspring survival rates under heat stress. These findings support a role of DNA methylation in the intergenerational inheritance of traits in corals, which could extend to enhancing their capacity to adapt to climate change. Intergenerational inheritance of traits in corals can help species survive environmental change. Examination of intergenerational DNA methylation profiles in a reef-building coral shows there to be genome-wide inheritance, with the potential for adaptive capacity to environmental stressors.
Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a339125dffcba1ddf860a2017219cde9b07813f4
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Citations in the corpus
- Deciphering Coral Disease Dynamics: Integrating Host, Microbiome, and the Changing Environment (2020, background): “While gene methylation has not been directly studied in the context of coral disease yet, studies looking at other stressors such as heat and nutrient addition do show methylation of immune-related adhesion and signaling genes in addition to housekeeping genes (Dimond and Roberts, 2016; Liew et al.,”