Environment-induced heritable variations are common

Abstract Parental or ancestral environments can induce heritable phenotypic changes, but whether such environment-induced heritable changes are a common phenomenon remains unexplored. Here, we subjected 14 genotypes of Arabidopsis thaliana to 10 different environmental treatments and observed phenotypic and genome-wide gene expression changes over successive generations. We found that all environmental 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 broadly contribute to the generation of heritable variation.