All organisms carry their parents in their DNA. But it’s become clear that offspring inherit information from many other places, too. Mammals inherit gut microbiomes while in utero, and antibodies through breast milk. Birds, reptiles, and fish inherit environmental information about the particular place they hatch.
“People tend to think genetics is the primary way information travels in biology,” says SFI External Professor and University of New Mexico computational biologist Melanie Moses. “Actually, there are many other ways biological information is encoded and stored and processed, at different time scales and for different reasons.”
Co-organized by Moses, the “Biological Information and Environmental Uncertainty” working group at SFI this April 30–May 2 will ponder questions like: what are these non-genetic forms of information in biology? Why aren’t they considered as salient as genetics? And what can they teach about the way living things cope with uncertain environments?
For example, while genetic data rarely changes over a lifetime, other biological information operates on wildly different yet interconnected calendars, from mere months up to evolutionary timescales — a scenario often referred to as “complex time.”
Imagine a mother who breastfeeds. She passes along some antibodies that encode a snapshot of diseases swirling around her at that moment, helping the newborn to fend off those diseases for a few months.
Meanwhile, a hatchling bird inherits its location — the particular spruce tree on a particular mountain slope where its parents chose to nest — along with information about its environment, from food sources to microclimate, shaped over millions of years.
The working group will bring together mathematical modelers, evolutionary biologists, ecologists, and biological theorists, many who first tackled questions about non-genetic biological information during an SFI event last year on the theory of genetics.
“We want to develop a more comprehensive view of biological information — one that doesn’t take a ‘genetics first’ approach, yet expands on what genetics has revealed,” says SFI External Professor Mary O’Connor, a University of British Columbia ecologist who co-organized both events.
For instance, while it’s well-established that genetics shapes immunity, the working group will discuss how other forms of information play a complementary role. One potential reason organisms inherit non-genetic information is to adapt to an uncertain, fluctuating environment faster than evolution can act on genes.
“We need to ask ourselves as scientists: is genetics really the most important kind of biological information because a single molecule can encode data across any organism, anywhere? Or have we focused on genetics because it’s easiest to manipulate, run experiments on, and understand?” says Moses.
Participants aim to produce a book chapter and proposed journal special issue, seeking to measure the true evolutionary impact of non-genetic information.
This event is supported by the James S. McDonnell Foundation Grant Number 220020491, Adaptation, Aging, and the Arrow of Time. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the James S. McDonnell Foundation.