Maternally experienced environmental stress leads to multigenerational inheritance of ethanol preference and an altered rewards pathway in Drosophila melanogaster.
In Caenorhabditis elegans histone methylation (H3K9me3) controls the synthesis of heritable small RNAs in a gene-specific manner and thus enables 'flagging' of newly-acquired genes.
Phosphate starvation in rice induces widespread, but transient, modulation of DNA methylation near stress responsive genes that is independent from the RNA-directed DNA methylation pathway.
Evidence is mounting that environmentally-induced adaptive changes in phenotype can be transmitted across generations, but mechanistic gaps and theoretical concerns must be addressed to impact mainstream views of evolutionary adaptation.