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Mothers ensure their offspring's success through epigenetics:

Parents pass genes along to their offspring traits that equip them for life. In recent years, research has shown that the reality is much more complex and that parents endow much more than just genes. A new study in Cell by the laboratory of Asifa Akhtar at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics reveals that active epigenetic modifications are also passed from one generation to the next.

Human mothers grow babies for nine months, and after giving birth, proceed to spend years raising and nurturing their children, teaching them how to perform both basic and advanced survival tasks. Fruit flies, on the other hand, lay eggs that are left to develop on their own. This makes them seem like irresponsible parents, just abandoning their young. However, a new study by the laboratory of Asifa Akhtar at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg suggests that fruit fly moms do, in fact, ensure the success of their offspring by providing them with an instruction manual for life encoded deep in their epigenomes.

[...] "The fact that fly mothers ensure their offspring's success through epigenetics even before they are conceived is a fascinating result," says Asifa Akhtar. The researchers next turned to mammals and found that female mice also pass the H4K16ac histone modification to their progeny through their oocytes. This raises the intriguing possibility that humans might also use H4K16ac from the mother as a "blueprint" for successful embryonic development. Whether this is the case and what information this blueprint might encode are open questions for future investigation.

More information: Maria Samata, et. al., Intergenerationally Maintained Histone H4 Lysine 16 Acetylation Is Instructive for Future Gene Activation,Cell (2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2020.05.026

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