The ability of environmental exposures to induce phenotypic change across multiple generations of offspring has gathered an enormous amount of interest in recent years. There are by now many examples of nongenetic transgenerational effects of environmental exposures, covering a broad range of stressors. Available evidence indicates that epigenetic inheritance may mediate at least some of these transgenerational effects, but how environmental exposures induce changes to the epigenome of the germline is unknown. One possibility is that exposed somatic cells can communicate their exposures to the germline to induce a stable change. In this Perspective, we propose that extracellular vesicles shed by somatic cells represent a credible means by which environmental experience could effect a transmissible epigenetic change in the germline, leading to the inheritance of acquired traits.
Keywords: epigenetic inheritance; exosome; extracellular vesicle; microparticle; shuttle RNA; small noncoding RNA; transgenerational effects.