A new European study shows how an organism has the capacity to create a biological memory of a variable factor like temperature or nutrition. According to the research team, the environment of an individual can actually affect the biology of physiology of their offspring but there is no change to the genome sequence.

Part of this study was funded by the ENVGENE ('Dissection of environmentally mediated epigenetic silencing') project, which received an Advanced Investigator European Research Council (ERC) grant worth €2.45 million under the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). This work uncovers an important mechanism that is at play right across biology and it gives us insight into a phenomenon that is crucial for future food security: the timing of flowering according to climate variation.

The research team drew upon a plant's ability to 'remember' the length of the cold winter season in order to kick-start the flowering process. According to the team, more cells will have FLC, an important gene, steadily flipped to the off position the longer the cold period is, leading to a delay in the flowering process. They found that the histone proteins near the FLC gene were modified during the cold period, thus accounting for the switching off of the gene. To the researchers, this is the explanation of how individuals could develop a 'memory' of a variable condition.