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

(www.nature.com)
138 points pmags | 1 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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devmor ◴[10 Apr 25 13:24 UTC] No.43643539{3}[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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blacksmith_tb ◴[10 Apr 25 17:48 UTC] No.43646373{4}[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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1. devmor ◴[11 Apr 25 02:21 UTC] No.43649902{5}[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.