[phkahler]

>> it would be quite logical for evolution to use neuronal DNA for weight storage.

To pass that down you'd have to replicate the connectivity of the network for the weights to be relevant right?

Related: The article doesn't say which DNA areas are broken and repaired. Nor does it say if they are modified. It seems like encoding weights in DNA would make them more robust but harder to change. If so, there should be a particular region where this is happening. Maybe there's a mapping between certain DNA areas and each synapse. That'd be really interesting.

[RaftPeople]

Independent of this breaking/fixing, it's already known that DNA near the synapse (not necessarily in the neurons Soma) is modified via epigenetics to sustain the synapse at the new level.

So yes, DNA epigenetic changes near the synapse are a key part of maintaining the "weight" or strength of that particular connection. ("key part" phrase because there is a lot of complexity and they haven't nailed it all down, there could be other "key parts").

[phkahler]

>> DNA epigenetic changes near the synapse are a key part of maintaining the "weight" or strength of that particular connection.

What do you mean by "near the synapse"? Is there DNA outside the nucleus or something? Is there DNA that maps (corresponds to) the synaptic pattern of the neuron?

[RaftPeople]

Yes there is DNA outside the nucleus. The DNA near each synapse gets modified (epigenetic) based on activity in that physical area so it can produce the proper proteins to preserve the state of that synapse over the long term.

Edit: the DNA is in Synaptic Vesicles

[juitpykyk]

Neurons are not on the germ line, whatever happens to their DNA is not passed down to your children.

There was another article in the recent years about neurons using RNA or DNA for storing information related to their activation patterns.

[axus]

The baby is connected to the mother's placenta for months, maybe information could be transmitted then. I've never heard anything to support that idea, though!

[ChainOfFools]

This always seemed like one of those little biological details, like the well known example of that nerve which loops all the way down a giraffe's neck and back again in order to connect two regions only a few inches apart, that shows that nature doesn't refactor.

Because it seems like such a waste of the opportunity afforded by extended physical secueity and direct connection between mother and developing child, that some means of transferring a portion of the mother's learned knowledge, or at least some coarse grained abstraction of it, to the fetus, has never developed.

The lazy dismissal of this question is just to say, if nature needed it, it would have evolved it, but this doesn't seem to hold in every case [0]. It seems rather that there was no way for such a capability to be built out of extending existing mechanisms, with the major barrier being the absence of nerve tissue in the umbilical cord, where higher level CNS connectivity might have evolved from as a foothold

[0] and certainly doesn't account for what may happen in the future unless nature is completely done developing everything that could be developed. Nor does it incorporate the idea that human manipulation of our own biology is not itself also part of nature.

[thro1]

Wellcome. Sometimes it may happen that familiar stem cells cross maternal-fetal barrier in placenta, persist somehow and start to function regardless, where stem cells are needed - usually in younger sibling coming from the older, in place of original cells, even in the brain - forming part of it as of another person (more or less) - interconnected but not the same..

The Most Mysterious Cells in Our Bodies Don't Belong to Us https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/01/fetal-ma... ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38861497 )

[JPLeRouzic]

In addition, most parts of the first cell of what will become a baby, come from the mother. This includes all DNA in mitochondria and another organelle that I don't remember the name.

[rolph]

epigenetic inheritance is real