Active Motif's Podcast

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Dr. Oded Rechavi, Professor at the University of Tel Aviv, to talk about his work on the role of small RNAs in transgenerational inheritance in C. elegans. The most prominent example of transgenerational inheritance is the Dutch famine of 1944 during World War II. Effects of this famine could be observed in the grandchildren of people that lived through this hunger winter, but the molecular mechanisms involved remain largely unknown. The guest of this podcast episode, Dr. Rechavi, has taken on the challenge to unravel parts of this puzzle by studying transgenerational epigenetics in C. elegans. It was already known that small RNA molecules could play a role in passing on information from one generation to the next, but it was not clear what exactly was being inherited. Was it RNAs? Or chromatin modifications? Or something else? Dr. Rechavi made several important discoveries in his journey to answer these questions. He started out by showing that