The germinal inheritance of epigenetic information in plants

Abstract

Germinally transmissible variants that arise by the anomalous imposition of developmental information on the genome are not uncommon in plant genetics, although they are often ignored. Better understanding of such variants is believed to be important because they appear to reflect basic features of developmental control processes. This paper briefly reviews classical genetic studies of such variants in plants, then discusses recent work on the genetic behaviour of plant transgenes, the results of which parallel and extend the classical genetic studies of these phenomena. An attempt is made to explain the molecular basis of these phenomena in terms of modern hypotheses on the dynamic organization of chromatin.