You Can't Blame Your Mother For That Anymore

University of Manchester scientists have looked at how gene imprinting (maternally- versus paternally-expressed genes) contributes to variation in traits, such as body size, that change continuously. In a genome-wide analysis in mice, they found ten loci that affect body size that showed more diverse and complex effect patterns than they expected. "Surprisingly, most imprinting effects were strongest during the post-weaning period, and many showed shifts in the pattern of imprinting over ontogenetic time," they write in the author summary of their work, published in PLoS Genetics.