Some sort of dogma about DNA methylation research posits that environmental changes might induce epigenetic changes, and these will be inherited in the next generation causing transcriptional adaptation. While this has been proposed many times, it has not been demonstrated conclusively. Most importantly, even if methylation states would be inheritable, their actual effect on transcription was unclear. At least in invertebrates, the role of gene body methylation was debated, but not well...

While we have traditionally focused on 5-methylcytosine DNA (5mC) methylation in the laboratory, we started exploring 6-methyladenine (6mA) some years ago with Pedro Romero Charria, the lab's second PhD student. The field was a bit messy since there have been high profile reports saying 6mA is present in all sorts of model systems, including mammals, plants or flies. However, this was also heavily contested. We decided to check for ourselves, since the scattered reports from ciliates, early...

After discovering that DNA methylation plays a key role in silencing hundreds of viral insertions in the protist Amoebidium , we began...