Biomarkers for holistic animal welfare monitoring represent a considerable unmet need in
veterinary medicine. Epigenetic modifications, like DNA methylation, provide important …

Organisms adapt to different environments by selection of the most suitable phenotypes from
the standing genetic variation or by phenotypic plasticity, the ability of single genotypes to …

Age is a fundamental life history attribute that is used to understand the dynamics of wild
animal populations. Unfortunately, most animals do not have a practical or nonlethal method …

DNA methylation, histone modifications, and non-coding RNAs are ubiquitous in the animal
kingdom. Histone modifications are apparently similar in all higher animal taxa but DNA …

Recent investigations with non‐model species and whole‐genome approaches have
challenged several paradigms in animal epigenetics. They revealed that epigenetic …

Phenotypic plasticity sensu lato, the generation of different phenotypes from the same
genome, is caused by developmental programmes, developmental stochasticity and …

Clonal organisms are particularly useful to investigate the contribution of epigenetics to
phenotypic plasticity, because confounding effects of genetic variation are negligible. In the …

There is great interest in exploring epigenetic modifications as drivers of adaptive
organismal responses to environmental change. Extending this hypothesis to populations …

DNA methylation modification can regulate gene expression without changing the genome
sequence, which helps organisms to rapidly adapt to new environments. However, few …

DNA methylation is an important epigenetic modification that is widely conserved across
animal genomes. It is widely accepted that DNA methylation patterns can change in a …