Non-Mendelian inheritance in worms

In collaboration with Karen Artilles and Andrew Fire at Stanford University , we have recently published (Artilles et al., Developmental Cell, 2019  ) a method to reliably generate worms that display non-Mendelian inheritance patterns. By over-expression a single gene (gpr-1) we were able to engineer the worms so that maternal and paternal DNA are segregated away from each other in the first cell division. This segregation results in progeny that (mostly) carry only paternal genomic DNA in the germline and therefore give rise to progeny that have only paternal genomic DNA. These strains allow for experiments to determine maternal and paternal contributions to setting up epigenetic patterns.