Plant genomes are littered with transposable elements (TEs). Because TEs are potentially highly mutagenic, host organisms have evolved a set of defense mechanisms to recognize and epigenetically silence them. Although the maintenance of TE silencing is well studied, our understanding of the initiation of TE silencing is limited, but it clearly involves small RNAs and DNA methylation. Once TEs are silent, the silent state can be maintained to subsequent generations. However, under some circumstances, such inheritance is unstable, leading to the escape of TEs to the silencing machinery, resulting in the transcriptional activation of TEs. Epigenetic control of TEs has been found to be closely linked to many other epigenetic phenomena, such as genomic imprinting, and is known to contribute to regulation of genes, especially those near TEs. Here we review and discuss the current models of TE silencing, its unstable inheritance after hybridization, and the effects of epigenetic regulation of TEs on genomic imprinting.

植物基因组中散布着转座元件（TE）。由于 TE 具有潜在的高度诱变性，宿主生物体已经进化出一套防御机制来识别它们并通过表观遗传学沉默它们。尽管TE沉默的维持已得到充分研究，但我们对TE沉默启动的理解有限，但它显然涉及小RNA和DNA甲基化。一旦TE静默，静默状态就可以维持到后代。然而，在某些情况下，这种遗传是不稳定的，导致TE逃逸到沉默机制，导致TE的转录激活。人们发现，TE 的表观遗传控制与许多其他表观遗传现象（例如基因组印记）密切相关，并且有助于基因的调节，尤其是那些靠近 TE 的基因。本文回顾并讨论了目前TE沉默的模型、其杂交后的不稳定遗传以及TE表观遗传调控对基因组印记的影响。