[
Nature,
1994]
On page 32 of this issue, a joint team from the Genome Sequencing Center (St. Louis, USA) and the newly founded Sanger Centre (Hinxton Hall, Cambridge, UK) report a contiguous sequence of over two megabases from chromosome III of the nematode worm, Caenorhabditis elegans. This is the longest contiguous DNA sequence yet determined, and it prompts rumination on how far we have come in the sequencing enterprise, and on how far - and where - we have
[
Epigenet Insights,
2019]
It is now clear that heredity is not determined purely by Mendelian genetic inheritance; sometimes, epigenetic signals can be passed from parent to progeny for multiple generations. This phenomenon is termed transgenerational epigenetic inheritance (TEI), and examples have now been observed in multiple organisms including plants, flies, mice, and nematodes. Here we discuss the recent findings that TEI is a multi-step process and that the putative chromatin modifiers SET-25 and SET-32 are important in the establishment but not maintenance of silencing.