Mary Gehring

One of the major interests of my lab is epigenetic regulation — how information not encoded in the DNA determines which genes are turned on and when. During sexual reproduction, when two genomes from a male and female come together, how does the epigenome change in order to set up the next generation? 

We're exclusively studying this question in plants, which have turned out to be a great system to work in. Epigenetic changes are really important during plant growth and development. We know that certain chemical tags get removed from the maternal genome, in order to prepare the new plant for development. We've recently discovered a similar but distinct process happening on the paternal genome. This points to a difference in how genes are expressed, depending on whether they were inherited by the mother or father.

More broadly, this is telling us about what we call "parent-of-origin" effects, where something that happened in the parents can influence the next generation.