In multicellular organisms, epigenetic inheritance is a process by which traits induced by life experiences or environmental factors in a parent are passed to offspring without involving changes in the DNA sequence, but rather in the epigenome. While epigenetic inheritance is evident in many species, from plants to rodents, it remains unproven in humans because of biological barriers, methodological complexity, and the difficulty of disentangling environmental from social and genetic factors. The unique human context of prolonged parental care, as well as cross-generational cultural and societal effects, compounds these difficulties and highlights the need for clear criteria to assess epigenetic inheritance claims. This article aims to help the field move from cataloging biological markers to conducting rigorous human research by clarifying key concepts and defining testable criteria as a guiding framework.
S. Løkhammer, C. Cecil, A. Jugessur et al.· Trends in Genetics· 0 citations
Understanding how biological age measures perform across development lays the groundwork for investigations into lifespan trajectories of healthy aging. We provide the most comprehensive assessment of epigenetic and brain age models across development (birth to 24 years; ≤20,917 observations across 15 cohorts), evaluating how these models associate with chronological age and with each other, and how these associations change across development. Chronological age-prediction accuracy of epigenetic and brain age models was modest and varied substantially. Accuracy improved with age and stabilized by middle childhood. Few brain and fewer epigenetic clocks performed stably and well across all developmental stages. Performance was better when age range and tissue corresponded between training and testing data. Associations between epigenetic-brain age residuals were small, and changed little across development, tissues or clock generation. Given this developmentally dynamic system of epigenetic-brain age performances and associations, we give key recommendations to improve developmental research in this field.
Marlene Staginnus, Vilte Baltramonaityte, I. Schuurmans et al.· bioRxiv· 0 citations
We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads.
See our Cookie Policy.
