Mothers Offspring success through epigenetics

Human mothers grow babies for nine months, and after giving birth, proceed to spend years raising and nurturing their children, teaching them how to perform both basic and advanced survival tasks. Fruit flies, on the other hand, lay eggs that are left to develop on their own. This makes them seem like irresponsible parents, just abandoning their young. However, a new study by the laboratory of Asifa Akhtar at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg suggests that fruit fly moms do, in fact, ensure the success of their offspring by providing them with an instruction manual for life encoded deep in their epigenomes.