RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Intergenerational adaptations to stress are evolutionarily conserved, stress-specific, and have deleterious trade-offs
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2021.05.07.443118
DO 10.1101/2021.05.07.443118
A1 Nicholas O. Burton
A1 Alexandra Willis
A1 Kinsey Fisher
A1 Fabian Braukmann
A1 Jon Price
A1 Lewis Stevens
A1 L. Ryan Baugh
A1 Aaron Reinke
A1 Eric A. Miska
YR 2021
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/05/08/2021.05.07.443118.abstract
AB Despite reports of parental exposure to stress promoting physiological adaptations in progeny in diverse organisms, there remains considerable debate over the significance and evolutionary conservation of such multigenerational effects. Here, we investigate four independent models of intergenerational adaptations to stress in C. elegans – bacterial infection, eukaryotic infection, osmotic stress and nutrient stress – across multiple species. We found that all four intergenerational physiological adaptations are conserved in at least one other species, that they are stress-specific, and that they have deleterious trade-offs in mismatched environments. By profiling the effects of parental bacterial infection and osmotic stress exposure on progeny gene expression across species we established a core set of 279 highly conserved genes that exhibited intergenerational changes in expression in response to stress in all species tested and provide evidence suggesting that presumed adaptive and deleterious intergenerational effects are molecularly related at the gene expression level. By contrast, we found that these same stresses did not elicit any similarly conserved transgenerational changes in progeny gene expression three generations after stress exposure. We conclude that intergenerational responses to stress play a substantial and evolutionarily conserved role in regulating animal physiology and that the vast majority of the effects of parental stress on progeny gene expression are reversible and not maintained transgenerationally.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.