Read on Twitter
Can’t believe the day has come and it’s here!
If I were the sensational type I might say that we discovered that stressed out parents make sexy kids, grandchildren and grand-grandchildren. But I’m going to do the responsible thing & explain it carefully in the thread below
https://twitter.com/biorxivpreprint/status/1329473635002822658
If I were the sensational type I might say that we discovered that stressed out parents make sexy kids, grandchildren and grand-grandchildren. But I’m going to do the responsible thing & explain it carefully in the thread below https://twitter.com/biorxivpreprint/status/1329473635002822658
First, congratulations to @itaitoker77, @itamar_lev, @YaelMor3 and everybody who worked on this paper - great team effort and all of you made crucial contributions. This took a lot of hard work and many great ideas, and I am really proud of all of you 
Seminal work has shown that OLD worms are much more attractive to males. When the hermaphrodites age, they run out of sperm, and in order to stay fertile they must attract males that will provide new sperm. They do this by secreting a pheromone.
We found that when worms are cultivated at slightly higher temperatures they start secreting the pheromone and mating with males already when they are young. The sperm is temp sensitive in many animals, from worms to humans.
But that’s just the beginning: The heat-triggered sex appeal transmits transgenerationally to unstressed progeny, via heritable small RNAs. We can cancel heritable attractiveness by inducible degradation of the Argonaute that carries the small RNAs across generations.
We identified a specific endogenous small RNA pathway, enriched in endo-siRNAs which target sperm genes, that can transgenerationally regulate sexual attraction, prevalence of males, and the rate of successful mating.
Multigenerational competition experiments and mathematical simulations revealed that over generations, animals that inherit attractiveness mate more than genetically identical siblings, and that their alleles spread in the population.
We propose that the sperm serves as a “stress sensor” which, via small RNA inheritance, can enhance outcrossing in challenging environments, when increasing genetic variation is advantageous
If you liked the new pre print 
and want to read more about small RNA inheritance in C.elegans, please see links below to some of our previous studies: https://twitter.com/odedrechavi/status/1297907153836158977
and want to read more about small RNA inheritance in C.elegans, please see links below to some of our previous studies: https://twitter.com/odedrechavi/status/1297907153836158977
