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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
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 05 2020, @03:22PM (2 children)
Eat, sleep, reproduce.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 05 2020, @03:23PM
Pass on histones via oocytes.
(Score: 3, Touché) by maxwell demon on Friday June 05 2020, @05:01PM
Sorry, your offspring died because you forgot to add the breathe instruction. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 05 2020, @05:08PM
They can't explain why the epigenetic communication works for sugar sugar mothers that are so fly [youtube.com].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 05 2020, @07:12PM (1 child)
>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
Alpha mothers get a surrogate to bring the baby to term. Then hire nannies to raise and nurture their children. Then the children are sent to boarding schools to learn upper class ways. Finally on to elite colleges to form the connectIons that ensure success.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday June 05 2020, @07:29PM
For now. Tomorrow's alpha mothers and fathers will ensure their offspring's success through genetic engineering and artificial wombs.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Friday June 05 2020, @09:38PM
Thanks Mom.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 06 2020, @04:54AM
Mothers would say no one will do as much for their offspring as they did. And most mothers do not teach survival skills to anyone. They are too occupied with telling their offspring how lucky they are to have such a great parent.
It is like the mothers were never born and have been around since the beginning of time. Somebody took care of you and taught you, mother bitch!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 06 2020, @08:59AM
This entire encoding system is just another way of "the apple doesn't fall far from a tree". It's encoding how the mother is surviving as the best starting point on how to survive. After all, they successfully made another generation? No?
It's not smart or anything. It's just a record and replay system.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2020, @07:15AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism#Transgenerational_epigenetic_inheritance [wikipedia.org]