Transgenerational Inheritance and Evolution of Epimutations (Peter Sarkies)

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Peter Sarkies from University of Oxford Biochemistry to talk about his work on Transgenerational Inheritance of Epimutations.

The team in the Sarkies lab focuses on investigating the connections between epigenetic gene regulation and evolution. The lab performs evolution experiments in the nematode C. elegans to determine if evolution can be influenced by epigenetic differences between individuals in a given population when no changes in the underlying DNA sequence are observed. A second area of interest of the team is evolution of piRNAs, which are present in metazoans but have been lost in nematodes during evolution.

References

• The Selfish Gene

• Sarkies, P., & Miska, E. A. (2013). Is There Social RNA? Science, 341(6145), 467–468. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1243175

• Beltran, T., Shahrezaei, V., Katju, V., & Sarkies, P. (2020). Epimutations driven by small RNAs arise frequently but most have limited duration in Caenorhabditis elegans. Nature ecology & evolution, 4(11), 1539–1548. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-01293-z

• Beltran, T., Pahita, E., Ghosh, S., Lenhard, B., & Sarkies, P. (2021). Integrator is recruited to promoter-proximally paused RNA Pol II to generate Caenorhabditis elegans piRNA precursors. The EMBO journal, 40(5), e105564. https://doi.org/10.15252/embj.2020105564

Related Episodes

• The Role of Small RNAs in Transgenerational Inheritance in C. elegans (Oded Rechavi)

• Epigenetic Influence on Memory Formation and Inheritance (Isabelle Mansuy)

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