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The DNA doesn't sport standard read/write access, what's happening is that the expression or not of some genes can occur on an individual and be inherited by its offspring. The DNA doesn't change (save for the chance of a tiny few random changes, as usual)...


In the situation described by the article, the changes in gene expression are happening in the rat's brains. These changes aren't going to make it into the rat's gametes.


(de)methylation is DNA read/write. The DNA does change, although the sequence of bases doesn't.


Methylation is like setting a preference in a config file.




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