Environmental & transgenerational epigenetics
Researcher & principal investigator · Örebro University, Sweden
How the environment an animal lives through is carried on to its offspring: in oysters, worms and zebrafish, through genes, epigenetic marks and the microbes that live with them.
Current research · EpiClim
As principal investigator of EpiClim, Manon Fallet uses zebrafish to study how warming waters, the pollutant PFOS and the two together affect fish across generations. The project combines physiology, embryology, behaviour tests and multi-omics to follow changes in gene activity, epigenetic marks and the microbiota.
Career
Interactive research stories
Each story turns one piece of research into an illustrated walk-through, built from the published figures and data.
Environmental Epigenetics · 2024 · interactive story
An interactive atlas of 34 studies, from worms and corals to wheat and rice, showing how epigenetic marks help living things cope with heat, acid oceans, salt, drought and floods, sometimes for generations.
Start the storyBMC Biology · 2023 · interactive story
Worms lived on a DNA-damaging cancer drug for twenty generations. Their inherited gene-activity notes held steady, but fragments of transfer RNAs rose by about 37% and began to flicker alongside gene activity.
Start the storyMicrobiome · 2022 · interactive story
Ten days among harmless microbes trained the oyster immune system for life. In a field outbreak, 8.5% of their offspring survived against 1% of the control line, and the study traces the protection to immune genes and inherited DNA methylation.
Start the storyDoctoral thesis · 2019 · interactive story
Young oysters were bathed in microbe-rich seawater for just ten days after birth. Months later they survived a deadly disease better. So did their offspring, and their grand-offspring, none of whom was ever exposed.
Start the storyThe doctoral thesis in numbers
Research themes
A review of DNA methylation, histone modifications and intergenerational effects across mollusc species, and how they may matter for adaptive evolution.
Parents exposed to the herbicide diuron while producing eggs and sperm passed altered DNA methylation patterns on to offspring that were never exposed themselves.
Early microbial exposure improved survival against Pacific Oyster Mortality Syndrome (POMS) and shifted immune gene expression, a memory carried into F2 and F3.
Twenty generations of worms on cisplatin: inherited epimutations kept the same rate and duration, while tRNA-derived fragments fluctuated more and tracked changes in gene activity.
Here, we demonstrate that early life microbial exposure durably improves oyster survival when challenged with the pathogen causing Pacific oyster mortality syndrome (POMS), both in the exposed generation and in the subsequent one.Fallet et al., Microbiome 2022 · from the abstract
Publications