ArticleCell2021
The role of the Cer1 transposon in horizontal transfer of transgenerational memory.
Article in Cell, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 47 papers.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
47 citing papers in PubMed, 96 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Cumulative effects of mutation and selection on susceptibility to bacterial pathogens in Caenorhabditis elegans.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2025Article
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- Gag proteins encoded by endogenous retroviruses are required for zebrafish development.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
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- "Arc - A viral vector of memory and synaptic plasticity".Current opinion in neurobiology · 2025Review
- Improving the odds of survival: transgenerational effects of infections.EMBO molecular medicine · 2025Review
- Reported transgenerational responses toeLife · 2025Article
- Capsid transfer of the retrotransposon Copia controls structural synaptic plasticity in Drosophila.PLoS biology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Animals face both external and internal dangers: pathogens threaten from the environment, and unstable genomic elements threaten from within. C. elegans protects itself from pathogens by "reading" bacterial small RNAs, using this information to both induce avoidance and transmit memories for four generations. Here, we found that memories can be transferred from either lysed animals or from conditioned media to naive animals via Cer1 retrotransposon-encoded virus-like particles. Moreover, Cer1 functions internally at the step of transmission of information from the germline to neurons and is required for learned avoidance. The presence of the Cer1 retrotransposon in wild C. elegans strains correlates with the ability to learn and inherit small-RNA-induced pathogen avoidance. Together, these results suggest that C. elegans has co-opted a potentially dangerous retrotransposon to instead protect itself and its progeny from a common pathogen through its inter-tissue signaling ability, hijacking this genomic element for its own adaptive immunity benefit.
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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.