Evidence has been building in recent years that our diet, our habits or traumatic experiences can have consequences for the health of our children — and even our grandchildren. The explanation that has gained most currency for how this occurs is so-called ‘epigenetic inheritance’ — patterns of chemical ‘marks’ on or around our DNA that are hypothesised to be passed down the generations. But new research from the University of Cambridge suggests that this mechanism of non-genetic inheritance is likely to be very rare.

A second study, also from Cambridge, suggests, however, that one way that environmental effects are passed on may in fact be through molecules produced from the DNA known as RNA that are found in a father’s sperm.

The mechanism by which we inherit innate characteristics from our parents is well understood: we inherit half of our genes from our mother and half from our father. However, the mechanism whereby a ‘memory’ of the parent’s environment and behaviour might be passed down through the generations is not understood.

Proteins are the building blocks of the cell. They do most of the work and are essential for the structure, function and dynamic regulation of the cell and body’s tissues and organs. Proteins rarely work alone, they interact, form protein complexes or bind DNA and RNA to control what a cell does. These complexes are key pieces of many important reactions within the cell, such as energy metabolism or gene regulation. Any change in those interactions, which can for example be caused by a mutation, can make the difference between health and disease. Hence, for understanding how cells operate, or what might go wrong in ill cells, it is essential to know how their building blocks interact.

New technologies allowed scientists during the last decades to understand the genetic information an organism possess, which of this information is actively used and which proteins are made by the cell in different circumstances. Now it is a big challenge to understand how biomolecules such as proteins and RNA messenger molecules combine to form the complexes required for a functional cell. In other words, we know the ten thousands of parts a cell is build off, but we don’t know how they belong together.

In a paper published in Nature Communications, scientists at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) describe the development of a new method, named “rec-YnH”, which was designed to understand the complexes formed between hundreds of proteins and RNAs at the same time.