Department of Biology and National Center for Behavioral Genomics, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02454, USA.
Curr Biol. 2010 Jan 26;20(2):149-55. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.11.035. Epub 2010 Jan 14.
Early life experiences have a major impact on adult phenotypes [1-3]. However, the mechanisms by which animals retain a cellular memory of early experience are not well understood. Here we show that adult wild-type Caenorhabditis elegans that transiently pass through the stress-resistant dauer larval stage exhibit distinct gene expression profiles and life history traits, as compared to adult animals that bypassed this stage. Using chromatin immunoprecipitation experiments coupled with massively parallel sequencing, we found that genome-wide levels of specific histone tail modifications are markedly altered in postdauer animals. Mutations in subsets of genes implicated in chromatin remodeling abolish, or alter, the observed changes in gene expression and life history traits in postdauer animals. Modifications to the epigenome as a consequence of early experience may contribute in part to a memory of early experience and generate phenotypic variation in an isogenic population.
早期生活经历对成年表型有重大影响[1-3]。然而，动物保留早期经历的细胞记忆的机制尚不清楚。在这里，我们表明，与成年动物相比，短暂经历应激抵抗 dauer 幼虫阶段的野生型秀丽隐杆线虫具有明显不同的基因表达谱和生活史特征。通过与大规模平行测序相结合的染色质免疫沉淀实验，我们发现特定组蛋白尾部修饰的全基因组水平在后生 dauer 动物中明显改变。涉及染色质重塑的基因亚组的突变消除或改变后生 dauer 动物中观察到的基因表达和生活史特征的变化。早期经验引起的表观基因组修饰可能部分导致早期经验的记忆，并在同基因群体中产生表型变异。
