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Cells are swapping their mitochondria. What does this mean for our health?

(www.nature.com)
138 points pmags | 7 comments | 09 Apr 25 00:55 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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ajb ◴[09 Apr 25 06:58 UTC] No.43629532[source]▶
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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perrygeo ◴[09 Apr 25 21:01 UTC] No.43637949[source]▶
Mitochondria doping! People are already thinking how to use it for sports performance. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/14/new-doping-trick...

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.

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1. vintermann ◴[10 Apr 25 13:07 UTC] No.43643399[source]▶
Doesn't sound like getting them into every cell in the body would be easy. If delivering a package with genes into every cell in the body was easy, viruses would be happy, figuratively speaking.

I just mapped mine, for what it's worth. A bit odd to have the whole 16000-something base pairs stored on my computer.

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2. devmor ◴[10 Apr 25 13:24 UTC] No.43643539[source]▶
We already have mitoviruses, it stands to reason they they might adapt to infect mitochondria that are being delivered to cells.
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3. eecc ◴[10 Apr 25 16:27 UTC] No.43645519[source]▶
How did you get that (and what guarantees on data privacy?)

I’d be very interested

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4. vintermann ◴[10 Apr 25 16:31 UTC] No.43645565[source]▶
I used family tree dna. Not really much in the way of guarantees on data privacy as you'd expect (at least not from a software developer's perspective), but I figure it's challenging enough to abuse knowledge of my exact mitochondrial haplogroup, that if someone can do that, they can do worse anyway.
5. blacksmith_tb ◴[10 Apr 25 17:48 UTC] No.43646373[source]▶
We haven't found any mitoviruses in animals, yet, at least?

1: https://virology.ws/2019/03/28/viruses-that-infect-mitochond...

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6. gsf_emergency_2 ◴[10 Apr 25 22:43 UTC] No.43648693[source]▶
>Doesn't sound like getting them into every cell would be easy

>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...

7. devmor ◴[11 Apr 25 02:21 UTC] No.43649902{3}[source]▶
We have viruses in animals that reproduce using the mitochondria already, but don’t exclusively target the mitochondria. I believed these were categorized as mitoviruses but I was mistaken.