By KiddieDaily Editors · Jun 30, 2026 · 2 min read · Ages 10–12 · 1 source

Scientists Discover Puzzling New Form of Inheritance That Doesn’t Involve DNA

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Facebook X LinkedIn Reddit WhatsApp Flipboard Bluesky Email Copy Link Home → Science A worm's strange sex change led scientists down a path towards a potential new form of inheritance.

Science is rarely straightforward. Many times, scientists embark on a study looking for evidence for a particular hypothesis, and in the process, they come across something totally unexpected and different from their original purpose. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it can be so exciting.

For Matthew Eroglu, it started with worms behaving oddly in his lab at the University of Toronto. He was studying cancer signaling pathways in nematodes but wound up stumbling upon a strange form of inheritance — one carried not by DNA or RNA, but by clumps of protein. Over generations, the worms he studied became less fertile and more feminine. Eventually, some stopped producing sperm altogether.

“We started with a different focus,” Eroglu recalls. What they found was an unusual form of epigenetic inheritance driven by amyloid-like proteins — structures more commonly associated with diseases such as Alzheimer’s, but which can also have normal biological roles. The discovery may help researchers think about mysteries such as “missing heritability,” the gap between how strongly some traits run in families and how much of that inheritance can be explained by known DNA variants.

Under the microscope, the researchers spotted something unusual: tiny, glowing green structures in the worms’ reproductive cells. Eroglu describes them as “glowing blobs.” These structures, which the team named herasomes, turned out to be aggregates of amyloid proteins—the same type of proteins whose accumulation in the brain is thought to be responsible for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. Amyloids are proteins that fold into sticky, clump-prone structures.

In the worms, these clumps accumulated when two specific genes, mstr-1 and mstr-2, were mutated. The clumps disrupt sex determination in the worms, leading to more feminized offspring. Remarkably, these protein clumps were passed down through generations, although the worms’ DNA remained unaltered.

Scientists have known for decades that genes alone don’t account for the full picture of inheritance. For instance, we now know about epigenetics — changes in gene expression that don’t involve alterations in DNA code — where mechanisms like small RNA molecules and chemical modifications to chromatin can alter traits that can be passed down to subsequent generations.

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