Parental or ancestral environments can induce heritable phenotypic changes, but whether such environment-induced heritable changes are a common phenomenon remains unexplored. Here, we subject 14 genotypes of Arabidopsis thaliana to 10 different environmental treatments and observe phenotypic and genome-wide gene expression changes over four successive generations. We find that all treatments caused heritable phenotypic and gene expression changes, with a substantial proportion stably transmitted over all observed generations. Intriguingly, the susceptibility of a genotype to environmental inductions could be predicted based on the transposon abundance in the genome. Our study thus challenges the classic view that the environment only participates in the selection of heritable variation and suggests that the environment can play a significant role in generating of heritable variations.

Biomedical Sciences College of Dental Medicine Western University of Health Sciences Pomona CA USA

Institute of Botany of the CAS Zamek 1 252 43 Pruhonice Czech Republic

Institute of Evolution and Ecology University of Tübingen Auf der Morgenstelle 5 72076 Tübingen Germany

Key Laboratory of the Ministry of Education for Coastal and Wetland Ecosystems College of the Environment and Ecology Xiamen University Xiamen Fujian China

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