What’s the News: We’ve long had signs that when it comes to inheritance, DNA isn’t the be-all, end-all. Trees that have the exact same genes but were raised in different greenhouses behave differently. Worms with genes that impart long life can pass on that longevity to their progeny—even if they don’t pass on the genes. Both of these phenomena, we’ve discovered, come from epigenetic changes in tags attached to DNA that control whether genes get expressed.
But every now and then we get a whiff of other possible routes for inheritance, even stranger than that. A new paper in Cell reports that worms whose grandparents had the ability to fight viruses using a fleet of tiny RNA molecules retain these molecules even when they don’t have the genes for them. They can pass these molecules down for more than a hundred generations.
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