[HN Gopher] Cells are swapping their mitochondria. What does thi...
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Cells are swapping their mitochondria. What does this mean for our
health?
Author : pmags
Score : 118 points
Date : 2025-04-09 00:55 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| ajb wrote:
| 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.
| JPLeRouzic wrote:
| Several implicit suggestions are made in the article, but I
| guess the largest application of externally cultivated
| mitochondria would be to aging.
|
| Here is an article about this (future) technology:
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5511681/
| perrygeo wrote:
| 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.
| JPLeRouzic wrote:
| Why transplant? Mitochondria are constantly fusing and
| fissioning. Wouldn't it be better to provide mitochondria
| with a more comfortable environment to ensure they fission?
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| Off the top of my head, I would imagine transplanting gives
| more control over the end result.
| kthartic wrote:
| Re mental health - this is extremely interesting if it turns
| out to be correct. Thanks for sharing
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| It seems like yet another misunderstanding of a series of
| complex problems by promising a simple one-stop solution.
| Maybe it'll work for some things, but it's also making
| claims that something like PTSD can be sorted out via a
| mitochondria flush, which doesn't make any sense to me.
| staplers wrote:
| You'd be aiding in one-half of the issue though
| (environment/internal).
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Maybe that would help, but the claim is that
| mitochondrial dysfunction is the source of every
| "literally, the entire DSM" mental disorder, and that is
| an unbelievable claim, especially when the DSM runs the
| gamut from PTSD to Erectile Dysfunction to Caffeine
| Withdrawal. It says to me that it's a poorly considered
| claim.
| mbil wrote:
| Dr Casey Means has a thought provoking book on this subject
| Good Energy. It's about how cell metabolic dysfunction could
| be implicated in a wide range of health conditions.
| vintermann wrote:
| 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.
| devmor wrote:
| We already have mitoviruses, it stands to reason they they
| might adapt to infect mitochondria that are being delivered
| to cells.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| We haven't found any mitoviruses in animals, yet, at
| least?
|
| 1: https://virology.ws/2019/03/28/viruses-that-infect-
| mitochond...
| eecc wrote:
| How did you get that (and what guarantees on data privacy?)
|
| I'd be very interested
| vintermann wrote:
| 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.
| gsf_emergency_2 wrote:
| > _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_transc
| r...
| smilliken wrote:
| > suggested that every mental disorder (literally, the entire
| DSM) has a single underlying cause: mitochondrial dysfunction
|
| On this topic, Brain Energy by Christopher Palmer:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61129785-brain-energy .
| Very interesting book, highest recommendation.
| bitwize wrote:
| "Well, eet's no use crying over speeled mitochondria..."
| --Ren Hoek
|
| 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.
| foxyv wrote:
| All I can think of right now is mental illness being caused
| by mitochondrial dysfunction and Parasite Eve. With the way
| the 21st century has been going to far, spontaneous human
| combustion would just seem like par for the course.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| https://www.sir.advancedleadership.harvard.edu/articles/brai.
| ..
|
| Ugh, it might be true, but hits _all_ the self-help scam
| stereotypes, and breathless paradigm-revolution science
| journalism stereotypes.
| pretzellogician wrote:
| This is what Matrix Bio wants to do, in fact!
| https://mitrix.bio/
|
| "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!
| abecedarius wrote:
| Interesting -- you can keep mitochondria alive outside of
| cells? Are there papers on what they need for that?
| bitcoin_anon wrote:
| In the meantime, read Good Energy to learn how to care for your
| mitochondria.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| TLDR?
|
| 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.
| spudlyo wrote:
| Do all these things, cultivate meaningful relationships,
| avoid anxiety and drug abuse and you'll be well on your way
| to becoming an optimal version of yourself.
| VeninVidiaVicii wrote:
| Oh is that all?
| spudlyo wrote:
| Sadly not. That mostly just covers your body and
| emotional well-being. You have to nurture your mind as
| well, which is beyond the scope of my pithy aphorisms.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| There are some supplements that seem to cause an increase in
| mitochondria in the body, but if you are not deficient in
| mitochondria I think they won't do much good for you.
| anarticle wrote:
| We stan a mito story! My old lab discovered some of what we
| called "kiss and run" dynamics:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss-and-run_fusion
|
| 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.
| pnutjam wrote:
| https://umdf.org/ Great organization working on Mitochondrial
| diseases. I have a family member with a diagnosed Mito disease.
| pfdietz wrote:
| This could be a mechanism for future intracellular repair. Build
| little repair robots that look like mitochondria, have them
| insert into cells, do their magic, then leave.
| roman_soldier wrote:
| "do their magic" seems like it's hiding a lot of complexity.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Very much so.
| epgui wrote:
| It would be much easier to package those into extracellular
| vesicles (exosomes or microvesicles) than into mitochondrial-
| like vehicles.
|
| 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).
| spudlyo wrote:
| Or you could occasionally fast for 5-7 days to dramatically
| ramp up the intensity of autophagy/mitophagy in order to have
| your body do this for you. No robots needed. You may also
| discover that you like the way your brain and body operate with
| a different ketone/glucose energy balance.
| brian-armstrong wrote:
| Any significant amount of fasting is a quick way to get some
| very unpleasant headaches for me. No thank you.
| spudlyo wrote:
| Low blood sugar and dehydration can lead to all kinds of
| unpleasant side effects. When I tried to fast for the first
| time, I was an idiot and didn't supplement with water or
| electrolytes and I suffered crippling cramps.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Low magnesium? I was having serious muscle cramps and
| found Mg supplements were highly effective.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Can't say I'm a fan of a prestigious scientific outlet adopting
| clickbait style headlines. This is the second one from the same
| place on the front page right now.
| epgui wrote:
| I did my MSc (biochem) on freeMitos and mitoMPs in a cancer
| immunology context, and I'm not really seeing the
| clickbaitiness here. The text seems totally reasonable.
|
| You need to realize you're reading editorial content, and not a
| review or research paper.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| The clickbait is the "What does it mean?" format.
|
| "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.
| pmags wrote:
| I posted the article here, and I had a fairly similar
| reaction to yours.
|
| 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.
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