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Social and behavioral epigenetics is the study of psychosocial factors that impact biology through an epigenetic mechanism. Epigenetic modifications influence the activity of genes without altering the underlying DNA sequence. DNA methylation is one type of epigenetic modification that has been widely studied and found to associate with a broad range of psychosocial stressors. This paper reviews the landmark studies and current innovations. An evolutionary context for epigenetic changes induced by psychosocial stress, and the possible heritability of such changes, is also presented. The involvement of social and behavioral scientists in this emerging field is essential to ensure that the nuances of the psychosocial environment are well understood and accurately modeled.
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Heritable epigenetic changes are constrained by the dynamics of regulatory architectures
Interacting molecules create regulatory architectures that can persist despite turnover of molecules. Although epigenetic changes occur within the context of such architectures, there is limited understanding of how they can influence the heritability of changes. Here, I develop criteria for the heritability of regulatory architectures and use quantitative simulations of interacting regulators parsed as entities, their sensors, and the sensed properties to analyze how architectures influence heritable epigenetic changes. Information contained in regulatory architectures grows rapidly with the number of interacting molecules and its transmission requires positive feedback loops. While these architectures can recover after many epigenetic perturbations, some resulting changes can become permanently heritable. Architectures that are otherwise unstable can become heritable through periodic interactions with external regulators, which suggests that mortal somatic lineages with cells that reproducibly interact with the immortal germ lineage could make a wider variety of architectures heritable. Differential inhibition of the positive feedback loops that transmit regulatory architectures across generations can explain the gene-specific differences in heritable RNA silencing observed in the nematodeCaenorhabditis elegans. More broadly, these results provide a foundation for analyzing the inheritance of epigenetic changes within the context of the regulatory architectures implemented using diverse molecules in different living systems.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2120895
- PAR ID:
- 10430241
- Publisher / Repository:
- eLife
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- eLife
- Volume:
- 12
- ISSN:
- 2050-084X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.92093.3
