Figure 1.

Parental pre-conception and in utero exposure to chemical substances, such as pesticides, cause epigenetic alterations in the germline that can be transmitted between generations and affect disease (including cancer) susceptibility in the progeny. Several mechanisms play a potential role in intergenerational and transgenerational transmission of disease predisposition including DNA methylation (1), transcription factor-associated DNA methylation patterns (2), histone modifications (3) and non-coding RNAs (4). Details are described in Section 4.