Aww… you have your mother’s… poison?!
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
Ever wish you could “turn off” something you don’t like about yourself? Our genes get turned on and off by D-N-A switches when we’re conceived. But sometimes even that can work against you! How can we switch it back?
Enter Pinelopi Pliota and team from the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna. They studied how these switches help worms defend themselves against D-N-A that poisons their eggs!
To test this, they bred worms with the harmful D-N-A with worms without it.
Affected females kept this D-N-A in their eggs. But, affected males didn’t! Why? It’s because of a kind of D-N-A immune system, called piRNA. In females, the harmful D-N-A can trick the immune system so that the poison stays. But in males the harmful D-N-A can’t fool the piRNA. So it gets switched off!
This decreased the poison D-N-A trait for up to EIGHT generations!
I guess father knows best. At least with worms.
Reference:Pliota, P., Marvanova, H., Koreshova, A., Kaufman, Y., Tikanova, P., Krogull, D., Hagmüller, A., Widen, S. A., Handler, D., Gokcezade, J., Duchek, P., Brennecke, J., Ben-David, E., & Burga, A. (2024). Selfish conflict underlies RNA-mediated parent-of-origin effects. Nature, 628(8006), 122–129. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07155-z