What is epigenetic memory and can it be passed from parents to offspring?  The Strome lab at UC Santa Cruz is tackling those burning questions in a tiny model organism.  Their studies have focused on germ cells, eggs and sperm, which carry information across generations.  They’ve discovered that germ cells pass an epigenetic memory of gene expression patterns from parents to offspring and that that memory is essential for the offspring’s germ cells to develop properly.  Without that memory, the offspring are sterile … end of the line for that population!