AP BIOLOGY

Detailed explanation-1: -Epigenetic variation within multicellular organisms is either endogenous or exogenous. Endogenous is generated by cell–cell signaling (e.g. during cell differentiation early in development), while exogenous is a cellular response to environmental cues.

Detailed explanation-2: -Epigenetics is the study of how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work. Unlike genetic changes, epigenetic changes are reversible and do not change your DNA sequence, but they can change how your body reads a DNA sequence.

Detailed explanation-3: -Epigenetic factors include DNA methylations, histone modifications, and microRNAs, and they can help to explain how cells with identical DNA can differentiate into different cell types with different phenotypes.

Detailed explanation-4: -Epigenetic heritability Epigenetic modifications, such as DNA methylation, can contribute to alter gene expression in heritable manner without affecting the underlying genomic sequences. Such epigenetic contribution would be systematically missed by conventional DNA sequence-based analyses.