Structural inheritance
![Prions, the infectious proteins that cause diseases such as scrapie, seen here, propagate by structural inheritance. On left, healthy lymph node tissue; on right, spaces between cells (blue) are filled with (dark red) prion protein.](/Images/godic/202502/13/Scrapie_lymph_node_immunoglobulin_labeling4604.png")
![The centriole, an organelle involved in cell division, is structurally inherited.](/Images/godic/202502/13/Centriole-en.svg4604.png")
Structural inheritance or cortical inheritance is the transmission of an epigenetic trait in a living organism by a self-perpetuating spatial structures. This is in contrast to the transmission of digital information such as is found in DNA sequences, which accounts for the vast majority of known genetic variation.