Project name: Caenorhabditis elegans

Description: For centuries, scientists have wondered whether the responses of animals and plants to environmental change can be transmitted to subsequent generations. Lately, there been much interest in the inheritance of information that is not encoded by differences in DNA sequence. Here we show that transient, mild heat stress results in a heritable change in the messenger RNA profile of early-stage C. elegans embryos. After heat stress is removed for one generation, abundances of most, but not all, mRNAs have relaxed to the unstressed state.Overall design: Our approach was to culture worms at 20°C, then split the culture into 20°C control and 25°C treatment, followed by return of the 25°C culture to 20°C. Specifically, we compared mRNA abundances in 4-cell stage embryos collected from mothers kept at 20°C, with embryos whose mothers were also reared at 20°C but whose grandparents had been reared at 25°C. Two strains and two generations under a treatment and under a control condition were analyzed by microarray with three separately collected 50-embryo replicates for each combination, for a total of 24 samples.

Data type: Transcriptome or Gene expression

Sample scope: Multiisolate

Relevance: ModelOrganism

Release date: 2011-12-31

Last updated: 2011-07-14