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

(www.nature.com)
138 points pmags | 2 comments | 09 Apr 25 00:55 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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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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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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1. 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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2. 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.