Paternal inheritance of stress resilience via the sperm epigenome in cnidarians

Abstract

The rapid pace of global climate change demands that marine organisms adapt to a warming ocean at a speed that traditional genome evolution via natural selection simply cannot match. Promisingly, organisms also possess an accelerated pathway for responding to rapid environmental change known as epigenetic inheritance–a mechanism where information about environmental stress is passed from parent to offspring without changes to the underlying DNA sequence. For decades, research has focused almost exclusively on epigenetic inheritance from mothers to offspring via the egg. The role of males has largely been dismissed due to the relatively small size and simple cellular structure of sperm cells compared to eggs. However, revolutionary discoveries in model systems (e.g., mice and C. elegans) have revealed that sperm carry special molecules called small RNAs that act as an inherited messaging system, dynamically tuning the offspring’s performance in response to the father’s environmental exposure. Whether this paternal transmission is a recent evolutionary innovation or is a foundational principle of animal biology remains a profound and significant biological mystery. By connecting marine organismal biology with state-of-the-art molecular genetics, this interdisciplinary collaboration will investigate sperm-mediated epigenetic inheritance in cnidarians (corals and sea anemones), an early-diverging lineage that sits at the base of the animal evolutionary tree and supports an incredible array of biodiversity.

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