Transgenerational Epigenetics

Snippet from a larger video overview of Epigenetics, since the beginning to our days, and of its implications for ecology, evolution and human disease.
Extract from a memorial review celebrating the 150th anniversary of Nature Journal. The review series can be found at www.nature.com... and the specific review is found here: www.nature.com...

[@jaquevius]

Not applicable to humans. “Heritance” from somatic cells is far different from what occurs after meiosis in the germ cell line, and it is that cell line that is responsible for transgenerational “inheritance.” In mammals, all of the epigenetics changes are removed and restored back to baseline. The cysteine is demethylated, and the histone’s spatial orientation/morphology epigenetics changes removed, which I find fascinating but is indeed a fact and was a surprise which destroys transgenerational epigenetic theory in fact. This is actually done twice, once after inception and once after implantation. Therefore no prior epigenetic changes from parent will pass to child, barring an extremely rare mistake ie: the equivalence of a rare nucleotide substitution that occurs in a genetic mutation if you will. This has been and continues to be extensively studied, but there is no evidence that the parent’s epigenetic changes can be passed to the offspring. If I am wrong, please elaborate, because I find it potentially dangerous that people are extrapolating this unproven if not disproven theory to subjects that could have large societal implications.

[@cavallilabvideos8738]

This is indeed a controversial field, with some publications supporting the existence of inheritance through multiple generations, mostly in mouse, despite the reset waves. A number of scientists remain skeptical and evoke confounding parameters affecting the published results. We published a review on the subject, see pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34983971/. The two best papers to my knowledge supporting transgenerational inheritance (published after our review) are from the Izpisua-belmonte lab: DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2022.12.047 and from the Terranova lab www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41998-w (although this last one shows inheritance of gene expression changes, not of a phenotype). The best paper arguing against this phenomenon in mouse is from the Ferguson-Smith lab: DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2018.09.043. In sum, I think the jury is out and there might be cases of transgenerational inheritance, although relatively rare. All this of course is very difficult to study in human. Nevertheless, I hope this information is helpful.

[@jaquevius]

@@cavallilabvideos8738 nice. Thanks for the links. I’ll check them out when I have time. My concern with this topic is that there are many influencers (usually the ones without a strong scientific background, and who focus on culture and societal implications at large) who state with complete confidence that this is 100% factual knowledge, which clearly it is not, and likely plays a nominal role. The extrapolation is insane. I saw one with Neil Degreese who was learning about it from someone who discussed behavioral observational data at best, but clearly doesn’t understand the epigenetic changes on a molecular level. The comment sections were riddled with people discussing how white people are responsible for numerous cultural problems with African Americans and the blame game was everywhere. The horse is out of the barn. I’ve heard some podcasters affirm the fact that men in certain cultures like certain body types due to epigenetic changes in ancestors that have been passed down, like it wasn’t possible to simply be a cultural preference, which is obviously is. In other words, parental and generational influence on children such as thought patterns, speech patterns etc are by far most likely due to learned behaviors and there is zero evidence that it’s from changes that affect gene expression, and a LOT of evidence that it isn’t.

[@ytubeanon]

it all sounds theoretical... gotta look up latest info

[@cavallilabvideos8738]

We published a review specifically on this subject - see www.nature.com/articles/s41576-021-00438-5