Transgenerational Epigenetic Instability Is a Source of Novel Methylation Variants
By Robert J. Schmitz, Matthew D. Schultz, M. Lewsey, Ronan C. O’Malley, M. Urich, Ondrej Libiger, Nicholas J. Schork, Joseph R. Ecker. Science, 2011
673 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Spontaneous methylation rates that may affect phenotype in the plant Arabidopsis are higher than the mutation rate. Epigenetic information, which may affect an organism’s phenotype, can be stored and stably inherited in the form of cytosine DNA methylation. Changes in DNA methylation can produce meiotically stable epialleles that affect transcription and morphology, but the rates of spontaneous gain or loss of DNA methylation are unknown. We examined spontaneously occurring variation in DNA methylation in Arabidopsis thaliana plants propagated by single-seed descent for 30 generations. We identified 114,287 CG single methylation polymorphisms and 2485 CG differentially methylated regions (DMRs), both of which show patterns of divergence compared with the ancestral state. Thus, transgenerational epigenetic variation in DNA methylation may generate new allelic states that alter transcription, providing a mechanism for phenotypic diversity in the absence of genetic mutation.
Subfields: Plant Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ebd4a6af0cac50266e605e249e9e87fba408a00e
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Plant Science
Citations in the corpus
- Reconsidering plant memory: Intersections between stress recovery, RNA turnover, and epigenetics (2016, background): “Naturally occurring epialleles such as the peloric variant of toadflax, Linaria vulgaris (91), and the colorless nonripening (CNR) locus from tomato (92) along with genome-wide studies (93, 94), natural variation (95, 96), and analysis of epigenetic recombinant inbred lines (97–99) demonstrate the s”
- Widespread dynamic DNA methylation in response to biotic stress (2012, background): “In Arabidopsis, DNA methylation is deposited at CG, CHG, and CHH sequences (where H is A, C, or T) through three genetically separable pathways to regulate transposon silencing (6), genomic imprinting (7–9), and stable gene silencing (3, 4, 10, 11).”
- Epigenomic diversity in a global collection of Arabidopsis thaliana accessions (2016, neutral): “Although changes in DNA methylation may arise spontaneously (Becker et al., 2011; Schmitz et al., 2011), genetic and environmental factors are almost certainly more important.”