Fascinating. I wonder if there will soon be a way to culture your mitochondria externally in order to give you extra, maybe it could help with diseases like chronic fatigue.
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Here is an article about this (future) technology:
Beyond athletic performance and chronic fatigue, some neurologists and psychiatrists have recently suggested that every mental disorder (literally, the entire DSM) has a single underlying cause: mitochondrial dysfunction. If that's true, mitochondria transplants could solve the mental health crisis.
Which had to do with watching live mitos exchange their insides. Specifically, to watch this process, you load your mitos with photoactivatable fluorophores, then use a laser to tag some which changes say your green emitting protein to red. Then you follow the color changed particles being exchanged between mitos. Same mechanism probably used here to watch cells swap mitos. Oh, and this has to be done with live cells.
Very cool stuff, mitos are so important to metabolism and more I hope we see mitohacking, as mentioned by perrygeo. A much safer performance enhancer when it's your own mitos.
I just mapped mine, for what it's worth. A bit odd to have the whole 16000-something base pairs stored on my computer.
"The goal is to produce bioreactor-grown mitochondria on an industrial scale, sufficient to supplement every person over the age of 55"
Although it might be preferential to get, say, properly genotyped mitochondria from champion horses!
On this topic, Brain Energy by Christopher Palmer: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61129785-brain-energy . Very interesting book, highest recommendation.
I don't think every mental health issue is traceable to mitochondrial dysfunction. But I'm pretty sure it's implicated in cardiovascular disease. Malfunctioning mitochondria can make your arteries more prone to inflammation which leads to greater lipid deposits. I even read somewhere (sorry, can't cite rn) that a major component of arterial plaques is bits of dead mitochondria.
You need to realize you're reading editorial content, and not a review or research paper.
That has been an active area of research for a fairly long time (decades), and there are already clinical applications that have been commercialized (eg.: mRNA vaccines packaged in lipid particles).
1: https://virology.ws/2019/03/28/viruses-that-infect-mitochond...
"Researchers are trying to work out why."
"Here's what 4k researchers think."
It's possible that clickbait is technically the wrong term but it's a pattern that I strongly associate with those practices. It's an idiocracy-esque development. Learning that it has spread to the likes of Nature is saddening.
I was tempted to remove the "What does this mean for our health?" part of the title, but I thought that such a large edit might be against HN policy / too much editorializing on my part.
In any case, I thought the article was worth posting because it's a nice intro to a area of recent progress in biology that not a lot of folks are aware of.
Edit: The key suggestions, according to a bot and condensed by me:
- Eat healthy.
- Sleep healthy.
- Exercise healthy.
- Try Intermittent Fasting to promote autophagy / mitophagy.
Ugh, it might be true, but hits all the self-help scam stereotypes, and breathless paradigm-revolution science journalism stereotypes.
>Viruses would be happy
As a programmer, I sometimes wondered at the value proposition of certain antiviral drugs, especially the ones that interfere with replication.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiviral_drug#Reverse_transcr...
What I got out of the book was two things:
* Mitochondria are freaking cool.
* The DSM is bollocks and metabolic dysfunction explains all mental illness.
Despite how radical the above sounds, the evidence for it is overwhelming. The book is largely an accessible tour of the evidence. It's well cited without being too academic.
And while Dr. Palmer is a prominent spokesperson for this movement, there are hundreds of other neurologists, psychiatrists and doctors on the same line.
(2014) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24845118/
"Evidence suggests that alterations in mitochondrial morphology, brain energy metabolism, and mitochondrial enzyme activity may be involved in the pathophysiology of different neuropsychiatric disorders"
(2021) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8291901/
"we provide a focused narrative review of the currently available evidence supporting the involvement of mitochondrial dysfunction in mood disorders"
(2022) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36181925/
"Increasing experimental evidence supports a role for mitochondrial dysfunctions in neuropsychiatric disorders. "
(2024) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01497...
"We summarize the existing literature on mitochondrial dynamics perturbations in psychiatric disorders/neuropsychiatric phenotypes"
While psychology today ain't a scientific journal, they provide an excellent summary, providing that evidence is both widespread and well known. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-therapy-center/2...
Dr. Chris Palmer's book "Brain Energy" is a good introduction to the body of research. Dozens of pages of citations, you can judge for yourself how well-considered they are. - "Mitochondrial dysfunction has been found in a wide range of diagnoses that include pretty much every symptom found in psychiatry".
"Pretty much every symptom" is not going hard enough. There has yet to be a single psychiatric symptom that isn't theoretically and empirically linked to metabolic dysfunction. The only symptoms he left out were the ones which have no published research!
And finally, just this week Forbes had a feature about it. Again, not a sci journal but there's enough interest to name it the "quiet revolution underway in psychiatry". https://www.forbes.com/sites/jessepines/2025/04/05/could-mit...
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Do you still feel that the metabolic theory of mental illness is an unbelievable claim, poorly considered?
It may not be THE only answer. But at the very least, this theory is well supported with decades of research and deserves serious consideration.