Germ plasm

Germ plasm (German: Keimplasma) is a

biological concept developed in the 19th century
by the German biologist August Weismann. It
states that heritable information is transmitted
only by germ cells in the gonads (ovaries and
testes), not by somatic cells. The related idea that
information cannot pass from somatic cells to the
germ line, contrary to Lamarckism, is called the
Weismann barrier. To some extent this theory
August Weismann's 1892 germ plasm theory. The
anticipated the development of modern genetics.
hereditary material, the germ plasm, is transmitted only
by the gonads. Somatic cells (of the body) develop
afresh in each generation from the germ plasm.
History
The term Keimplasma (germ plasm) was first used by the German
biologist, August Weismann (1834–1914), and described in his 1892 book
Das Keimplasma: eine Theorie der Vererbung (The Germ Plasm: a theory
of inheritance).[1] His theory states that multicellular organisms consist of
germ cells that contain and transmit heritable information, and somatic
cells which carry out ordinary bodily functions.[1][2] In the germ plasm
theory, inheritance in a multicellular organism only takes place by means
of the germ cells: the gametes, such as egg cells and sperm cells. Other
cells of the body do not function as agents of heredity. The effect is one-
way: germ cells produce somatic cells, and more germ cells; the germ
cells are not affected by anything the somatic cells learn or any ability the
body acquires during its life. Genetic information cannot pass from soma August Weismann
to germ plasm and on to the next generation. This is referred to as the proposed the germ plasm
Weismann barrier.[3] This idea, if true, rules out the inheritance of theory in the 19th century,
before the foundation of
acquired characteristics as proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, like others
modern genetics.
before him, and accepted by Charles Darwin both in On the Origin of
Species and as part of his pangenesis theory of inheritance.[4]

However, a careful reading of Weismann's work over the span of his entire career shows that he had more
nuanced views. He insisted, like Darwin, that a variable environment was necessary to cause variation in
the hereditary material.[2] Because genetic information cannot pass from soma to germ plasm, these
external conditions, he believed, caused different effects on the soma and the germ plasm. Thus, the
historian of science Rasmus G. Winther states, Weismann was not a Weismannian, as he, like Darwin, did
believe in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which later came to be known as Lamarckian.[2]

The part of Weismann's theory which proved most vulnerable was his notion that the germ plasm
(effectively, genes) was successively reduced during division of somatic cells. As modern genetics
developed, it became clear that this idea is wrong in most cases.[5] Cases such as Dolly, the cloned sheep,
proved via somatic cell nuclear transfer that adult cells retain a complete set of information – as opposed
to Weismann's increasingly determined gradual loss of genetic information – putting this aspect of
Weismann's theory to rest as a general rule of metazoan development. However, genetic information is
readily lost by somatic cells in some groups of animals through somatic genome processing. The best
known example is the nematodes, in which the phenomenon of chromatin diminution was first described
by Theodor Boveri in 1887.[6]

The idea was to some extent anticipated in an 1865 article by Francis Galton, published in Macmillan's
Magazine, which set out a weak version of the concept. In 1889 Weismann wrote to acknowledge that
"You have exposed in your paper an idea which is in one essential point nearly allied to the main idea
contained in my theory of the continuity of germ-plasm".[7]

Modern view
The idea of the Weismann barrier, namely that changes acquired during an organism's life cannot affect
its offspring, is still broadly accepted. This has been extended into molecular terms as the central dogma
of molecular biology, which asserts that information written in the form of proteins cannot be fed back
into genetically transmissible information encoded in nucleic acids.[8]

The Weismannian notion that the germ cells are unaffected by somatic cells or their environment is
however proving not to be absolute. Chemical modification of the nucleotide bases that constitute the
genetic code such as methylation of cytosines as well as modifications of the histones around which DNA
is organized into higher-order structures are influenced by the metabolic and physiologic state of the
organism and in some cases can be heritable. Such changes are called epigenetic because they do not alter
the nucleotide sequence.[9]

References
1. Weismann, August (1892). Das Keimplasma: eine Theorie der Vererbung (https://archive.or
g/details/bub_gb_f5U-AAAAYAAJ). Jena: Fischer.
2. Winther, Rasmus G. (2001). "August Weismann on Germ-Plasm Variation". Journal of the
History of Biology. 34 (3): 517–555. doi:10.1023/A:1012950826540 (https://doi.org/10.102
3%2FA%3A1012950826540). ISSN 0022-5010 (https://search.worldcat.org/issn/0022-501
0). JSTOR 4331686 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/4331686). PMID 11859887 (https://pubme
d.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11859887). S2CID 23808208 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:2
3808208).
3. Germ-Plasm, a theory of heredity (1893) (http://www.esp.org/books/weismann/germ-plasm/f
acsimile/)
4. Huxley, Julian (1942). Evolution, the Modern Synthesis. p. 17. JSTOR 4331686 (https://ww
w.jstor.org/stable/4331686).
5. For example, by studies of polytene chromosomes in salivary glands (i.e. somatic cells) of
larval Drosophila.
6. Streit, Adrian (November 2012). "Silencing by Throwing Away: A Role for Chromatin
Diminution" (https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.devcel.2012.10.022). Developmental Cell. 25 (5):
918–919. doi:10.1016/j.devcel.2012.10.022 (https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.devcel.2012.10.02
2). PMID 23153488 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23153488).
 7. The Rough Guide to Evolution: Galton or Weismann first to continuity of the germ-plasm? (h
ttp://roughguidetoevolution.blogspot.com/2011/08/galton-or-weismann-first-to-continuity.htm
l)
8. Turner, J. Scott (2013). Henning, Brian G.; Scarfe, Adam Christian (eds.). Biology's Second
Law: Homeostasis, Purpose, and Desire (https://books.google.com/books?id=naQm1_Lutq4
C&pg=PA192). Rowman and Littlefield. p. 192. ISBN 978-0-7391-7436-4. "Where
Weismann would say that it is impossible for changes acquired during an organism's lifetime
to feed back onto transmissible traits in the germ line, the CDMB now added that it was
impossible for information encoded in proteins to feed back and affect genetic information in
any form whatsoever, which was essentially a molecular recasting of the Weismann barrier."
{{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
9. Berger, S. L.; Kouzarides, T.; Shiekhattar, R.; Shilatifard, A. (2009). "An operational definition
of epigenetics" (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3959995). Genes &
Development. 23 (7): 781–83. doi:10.1101/gad.1787609 (https://doi.org/10.1101%2Fgad.17
87609). PMC 3959995 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3959995).
PMID 19339683 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19339683).

External links
"Germ-Plasm" (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_New_International_Encyclop%C3%A6di
a/Germ-Plasm). New International Encyclopedia. 1906.

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