Further information regarding the inheritance of immunity to viruses



> Recently, inherited RNA interference has been shown to act as a multigenerational genome surveillance apparatus. 



> RNA inheritance enables physiologically relevant acquired traits to be heritable. We discovered that worms are resistant to viruses in part owing to the inheritance of anti-viral small RNAs (viRNAs). The underlying genetics is non-Mendelian, as the persistence of the anti-viral viRNAs is achieved by RdRP-mediated amplification of the small RNAs in every adopting generation (Rechavi et al. 2011). A recent study by Sterken et al. demonstrates that similar RNAi-based inherited immunity serves to control infection by the Orsay virus, the sole C. elegans virus that is capable of infecting Caenorhabditis in the wild



> Based on the very recent work of a number of groups, a broader understanding of surveillance of germ line expression by heritable small RNAs emerges. Trans- generationally inherited small RNAs keep a memory of every germ line-expressed gene. If a gene is not marked by an inherited cognate endogenous siRNA that ‘licenses’ it for expression, it is recognized as an element that has recently invaded the germ line (as a virus or a transposon), and consequently gets silenced by PIWI-interacting small RNAs



> In principle, this inheritance mechanism could affect, in addition to mobile elements, the expression of every gene, and thus every trait.



Sela, M., Kloog, Y., & Rechavi, O. (2014). Non‐coding RNAs as the bridge between epigenetic mechanisms, lineages and domains of life. The Journal of physiology, 592(11), 2369-2373.



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