Functions and mechanisms of epigenetic inheritance in animals

Our review on inter- and transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in animals is just out in Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology. This is our take on trying to summarise a highly complex and polemic field on a few pages of text. This effort was led by Ksenia Skvortsova and our long term collaborator Nicola Iovino from the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics. For those who don’t feel like reading the whole piece, this is a two-sentence summary of the review: Briefly, epigenetic inheritance (EI) across generations is widespread in animals. There are excellent examples in flies and worms. In mammals EI that spans multiple generations is a rare event. Anamniotes that lack embryonic epigenome reprogramming might be useful models for EI.