Curious if in vitro fertilization (IVF) could consider RNA impact when evaluating fitness.

Current criteria appear to be motility, morphology, and DNA attributes (fragmentation & integrity) [1], all mostly visual or physical assessments.

[1] https://vidafertility.com/en/best-sperm-selection/

Lamarck has entered the chat

> “It’s still very hand-wavy,” said the epigeneticist Colin Conine (opens a new tab) of the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

okay, I trust this article and source more

where can I keep up with this in more mainstream but technical publications

Exercise and take nicotine. My kids have a leg up it seems.

assuming this is true, perhaps it's best to freeze sperm regularly with labels that way if you go off the deep end you can snapshot quite literally your best self? some possible times - right before college, right after college, after you meet someone you think you'd marry (but before you do), after marriage.

seems like a neat premise for sci fi novella

Someone who works out every day will obviously have different metabolic and microRNA profiles; assuming that line of research holds up and those biomolecular profiles make it into the zygote, survive many replication cycles, and act as developmental signalling molecules affecting gene expression during embryonic and fetal development, there could be life-long effects.

What can't happen is inter-generational transmission of particular subjective experiences that aren't pared with specific, unique metabolic, hormonal, and gene-expression signatures. Only biomolecular-mediated phenotypes, the most general and obvious of which would be things like stress or exercise or diet, make sense to be transmitted that way.

For instance, someone who's chronically afraid might transmit some kind of stress/fear modulating signals to offspring. Someone who's afraid of a specific thing, however, cannot transmit fear of that specific thing unless there's some incredible and unexplored cognition-to-biomolecular signalling mechanism that's entirely unexplored and undescribed. Therefore, I don't know why the article uses the term "lived experience", which is too broad a term to describe what the research suggests might be occurring.

This reminds me of the transgenerational trauma on the descendants of the Dutch Hongerwinter of 1944-45. Generations after, people carry in their epigenics the effects of that tragedy:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics_of_anxiety_and_str...