The Behavioral Effect of Small RNA Differential Expression Induced Mammal Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance

Background/Objectives: Recently, the phenomenon called Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance (TEI) is getting more and more focused. The effect of this non-mendelian inheritance is demonstrated to have a wider effect on people’s health and also the behavioral change in certain animals. However, as this is a newly emerged area, much research is focused more on the invertebrate or simpler form of prokaryote which is due to the difficulty of doing animal research. In this review, I examine 192 researches and review and selected 99 as references which focus the discussion on. Experimental findings from mammalian studies will be compared and analyzed, along with a discussion of the mechanisms through which small RNAs contribute to TEI. The complex nature of epigenetic changing still confusing people and the variety of possibilities also enhance the difficulty of isolated and clarified single mechanism. Various Conclusions: Focusing on the sncRNA transgenerational epigenetic effect in mammals, this review article tries to synthesize the mechanism of small RNA in epigenetic effect and providing suggestion for the future researches.