Ep 29: Lick Your Kids (Frances Champagne)

Credit: UT Austin

How important are pathways other than DNA for transmitting traits from one generation to the next?

On this episode of Big Biology, we talk to neuroscientist Frances Champagne from the University of Texas at Austin. Using rodents, Frances studies how early-life experiences affect epigenetic marks and how those marks are passed from one generation to the next. We asked her how those marks influence rat behaviors, why this mechanism alters modern evolutionary theory, and whether the growing interest in epigenetics is vindicating Lamarck’s old ideas about the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

Read France’s Functional Ecology paper on the interplay between maternal and paternal epigenetic effects in behavioral ecology!

This episode is sponsored by Functional Ecology, published by the British Ecological Society. Functional Ecology publishes research that enables a mechanistic understanding of ecological pattern and process from the organismic to the ecosystem scale – asking the how and why questions in ecology.

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