ReviewProceedings. Biological sciences2014
Can environmental conditions experienced in early life influence future generations?
Review in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 98 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
98 citing papers in PubMed.
- Intake of mother's milk by very-low-birth-weight infants and variation in DNA methylation of genes involved in neurodevelopment at 5.5 years of age.The American journal of clinical nutrition · 2022Trial
- Evolutionary trade-offs between intergenerational and transgenerational fitness effects.Evolution letters · 2026Article
- When Does Stress Build Strength? Linking Stress Physiology to Resilience in the Age of Rapid Environmental Change.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2026Review
- The Priming Impacts of Early Hypoxia Exposure in Abalone Parents Are Transmitted to Offspring.Molecular ecology · 2026Article
- Environmental microbial communities and host selection shape larval microbiomes.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Developmental warming induces severe deformities and mortality in a thermally tolerant fish species.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Embryonic Hormetic Priming Modulates Later-Life Thermal Tolerance.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Further integrating social context into comparative and environmental physiology.The Journal of experimental biology · 2026Review
- Consistent and flexible maternal effects: how the environments of a mother influence the offspring phenotype.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- A Cross-Generational Methylomic Signature of Infant Maltreatment in Newborn Rhesus Macaques.Biological psychiatry · 2025Article
- Transcriptomic basis of within- and trans-generational predator-induced plasticity in the freshwater snail Physa acuta.Heredity · 2025Article
- Physiological and Metabolic Responses of Wheat (ACS agricultural science & technology · 2025Article
- Prenatal Corticosterone Impacts Nestling Condition and Immunity in Eastern Bluebirds.Journal of experimental zoology. Part A, Ecological and integrative physiology · 2025Article
- Brain handedness associations depend on how and when handedness is measured.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Hidden Causes of Variation in Offspring Reproductive Value: Negative Effects of Maternal Breeding Age on Offspring Telomere Length Persist Undiminished Across Multiple Generations.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Maternal stress effects across generations in a precocial bird.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- The effect of parental age on the quantity and quality of offspring inEvolutionary applications · 2024Article
- Timing-specific parental effects of ocean warming in a coral reef fish.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- How important is hidden phenotypic plasticity arising from alternative but converging developmental trajectories, and what limits it?The Journal of experimental biology · 2024Article
- Environmental and Genetic Traffic in the Journey from Sperm to Offspring.Biomolecules · 2023Review
38 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The consequences of early developmental conditions for performance in later life are now subjected to convergent interest from many different biological sub-disciplines. However, striking data, largely from the biomedical literature, show that environmental effects experienced even before conception can be transmissible to subsequent generations. Here, we review the growing evidence from natural systems for these cross-generational effects of early life conditions, showing that they can be generated by diverse environmental stressors, affect offspring in many ways and can be transmitted directly or indirectly by both parental lines for several generations. In doing so, we emphasize why early life might be so sensitive to the transmission of environmentally induced effects across generations. We also summarize recent theoretical advancements within the field of developmental plasticity, and discuss how parents might assemble different 'internal' and 'external' cues, even from the earliest stages of life, to instruct their investment decisions in offspring. In doing so, we provide a preliminary framework within the context of adaptive plasticity for understanding inter-generational phenomena that arise from early life conditions.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.