The environment experienced by an animal can sometimes influence gene expression for one or a few subsequent generations. Here, we report the observation that a temperature-induced change in expression from a Caenorhabditis elegans heterochromatic gene array can endure for at least 14 generations. Inheritance is primarily in cis with the locus, occurs through both oocytes and sperm, and is associated with altered trimethylation of histone H3 lysine 9 (H3K9me3) before the onset of zygotic transcription. Expression profiling reveals that temperature-induced expression from endogenous repressed repeats can also be inherited for multiple generations. Long-lasting epigenetic memory of environmental change is therefore possible in this animal.

This work was supported by a European Research Council Consolidator grant (616434), the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (BFU2011-26206 and SEV-2012-0208), the AXA Research Fund, the Bettencourt Schueller Foundation, Agència de Gestió d’Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca (AGAUR), Framework Programme 7 project 4DCellFate (277899), and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory–Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG) Systems Biology Program. A.K. was partially supported by a la Caixa Fellowship. E.C. and T.V. were supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (BFU2015-70581) and by an FI AGAUR Ph.D. fellowship to E.C. RNA-seq data sets are deposited in the National Center for Biotechnology Information Gene Expression Omnibus under accession GSE83528