High school didn't teach you how to do your taxes, how to negotiate pay, or the value of creativity, but I bet all of you learned that THE MITOCHONDRION IS THE POWERHOUSE OF THE CELL.
Let's talk about what you SHOULD have learned about mitochondria.🧪
Let's talk about what you SHOULD have learned about mitochondria.🧪
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1.45 billion years ago, a prokaryote (bacteria) invaded a eukaryote (animal cell).
This prokaryote processed a highly corrosive gas, oxygen, to produce 15 times the ATP (energy) of the anaerobic cell it invaded.
Over time, it became the mitochondria. Our bacterial ancestry is in every cell.
mtDNA 16 kilobases
nuclear genome 3,300,000 kilobases (human)
Red blood cells (80% of all human cells!) have none.
Mature human oocytes (eggs) have ~100,000.
That means that a diploid cell might have 2 copies of each nuclear chromosome, but between 10 and 1,000,000 copies of the mitochondrial genome, averaging around 500.
Because sperm's only mitochondria are discarded in fertilization, convention is that you only inherit your mother's mtDNA, although we are realizing there are some rare exceptions to that rule.
Your cells contain a mixture of any variations in those mitochondria, so if a mutation occurs in mtDNA, it ends up in only some of your adult cells.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37461691/#:~:text=In%20bivalves%2C%20however%2C%20mitochondrial%20DNA,only%20from%20fathers%20to%20sons.
But this is fascinating. I can even accept that my old beloved phrase is not quite right.