Merly C. Vogt recalls a seminal paper by Greer et al., who demonstrated the transgenerational inheritance of longevity, a complex trait, in Caenorhabditis elegans by manipulating the trimethylation of histone H3 lysine 4 (H3K4me3) in the parental generation.

Satterlee et al. employ several approaches to demonstrate that prickle evolution has a common genetic basis among several plant lineages.

Duttke et al. show that transcription factors have position-dependent effects relative to their distance from the transcription start site, which suggests that a 'spatial grammar' could be used to encode multiple gene-regulatory programmes.

In this Tools of the Trade article, Pablo Librado describes a novel computational method to infer the time between successive generations from genomic data, including ancient genomes, which offers new insights into the timing of evolutionary and demographic events.

Neumann, Bertozzi et al. describe a novel epigenetic editor termed CHARM and report its use to silence prion protein expression in the brain.

Two studies in Nature reveal the mechanistic and structural properties of a family of mobile genetic elements that can be reprogrammed to engineer genome modifications.