No fear conditioned epigenetic inheritance from mothers?

Max_B

Member
Interesting new paper, which explores rat offspring inheritance of fear conditioning from their mother...

http://m.pnas.org/content/early/2014/07/23/1316740111.full.pdf

The authors explored this question from the side of the female rat, and - as far as I can see - the behavioral studies conducted on the offspring, don't appear to show that they can inherit the mothers prior fear conditioning to an odour, other than through normal social transmission.

These results are quite different to other epigenetic studies which explore a similar question, but from the side of the father (Dias & Ressler 2014) . In those studies, there appears to be an inheritance effect within the fathers offspring, and social transmission seems to be ruled out.

So far, this appears to show that there is a difference between females and males, as to the mechanism by which their offspring inherent their prior fear conditioning. Why's this interesting to me...? Well as far as I know... all the ova of female rats and mice were already formed before they were born, where as the males are producing fresh sperm throughout their life.

To me, this would seem to allow quick evolutionary adaption in offspring, when when the environment is changing/dangerous/stressful etc. with behavioral traits which favor epigenetic transmission from the male. Where as in safe unchanging environments, it seems like this effect might be almost hidden, perhaps favoring social transmission to offspring that favors behavioral traits from the female?

Just thinking about human matriarchal societies... as well as Bonobos...
 
So far, this appears to show that there is a difference between females and males, as to the mechanism by which their offspring inherent their prior fear conditioning. Why's this interesting to me...? Well as far as I know... all the ova of female rats and mice were already formed before they were born, where as the males are producing fresh sperm throughout their life.

To me, this would seem to allow quick evolutionary adaption in offspring, when when the environment is changing/dangerous/stressful etc. with behavioral traits which favor epigenetic transmission from the male. Where as in safe unchanging environments, it seems like this effect might be almost hidden, perhaps favoring social transmission to offspring that favors behavioral traits from the female?

Just thinking about human matriarchal societies... as well as Bonobos...

Wow, that's really interesting. Great point.
 
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