Transgenerational epigenetics

Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance is the transmission of information from one generation of an organism to the next (i.e., parent–child transmission) that affects the traits of offspring without alteration of the primary structure of DNA (i.e., the sequence of nucleotides)—in other words, epigenetically. The less precise term 'epigenetic inheritance' may be used to describe both cell–cell and organism–organism information transfer. Although these two levels of epigenetic inheritance are equivalent in unicellular organisms, they may have distinct mechanisms and evolutionary distinctions in multicellular organisms. Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance is the transmission of information from one generation of an organism to the next (i.e., parent–child transmission) that affects the traits of offspring without alteration of the primary structure of DNA (i.e., the sequence of nucleotides)—in other words, epigenetically. The less precise term 'epigenetic inheritance' may be used to describe both cell–cell and organism–organism information transfer. Although these two levels of epigenetic inheritance are equivalent in unicellular organisms, they may have distinct mechanisms and evolutionary distinctions in multicellular organisms. For some epigenetically influenced traits, the epigenetic marks can be induced by the environment and some marks are heritable, leading some to view epigenetics as a relaxation of the rejection of the inheritance of acquired characteristics (Lamarckism). Four general categories of epigenetic modification are known: