> While the Murphy group consistently observed this attraction in their assays, the Hunter group generally did not (Kaletsky et al., 2025). The Vidal-Gadea group also observed that worms that had not been exposed to PA14 were initially attracted to it, suggesting that this is an important piece of the puzzle (Akinosho et al., 2025). Indeed, when tested directly, the Murphy group did not observe attraction using the temperature-shift method (Kaletsky et al., 2025). However, whether the omission of azide alone explains the discrepancy between the studies is not clear. In a handful of assays, the Hunter group used azide but failed to see the initial attraction to PA14, or to observe learned avoidance in the F2 generation.

Every time I look into epigenetic inheritance studies I run into a lot of finicky experiments like this, where the outcomes appear to be highly dependent on several variables that aren’t fully understood.

One group of researchers claims to have pinned down the results, but as someone outside of this world trying to interpret the studies it’s hard to know how well they’ve really controlled these finicky experiments to isolate the single effect (epigenetic inheritance) that they claim explains everything.

It can be simplified to this question:

- Do C. elegans offspring show a modified behaviour unrelated to a changed genome sequence?

That is a fairly simple question. The answer to it should be simple too.

You always have to distill complicated papers that babble about things to a minimum statement.