An interesting paper was published in the week before Christmas. Mitochondrial quality control: the real dawn of intervertebral disc degeneration? The summary states: Intervertebral disc degeneration is the most common disease in chronic musculoskeletal diseases and the main cause of low back pain, which seriously endangers social health level and increases people’s economic burden. Disc degeneration is characterized by NP cell apoptosis, extracellular matrix degradation and disc structure changes. It progresses with age and under the influence of mechanical overload, oxidative stress and genetics. Mitochondria are not only the energy factories of cells, but also participate in a variety of cellular functions such as calcium homeostasis, regulation of cell proliferation, and control of apoptosis. The mitochondrial quality control system involves many mechanisms such as mitochondrial gene regulation, mitochondrial protein import, mitophagy, and mitochondrial dynamics. A large numbe...
The fact that mitochondria have their own DNA has been known for a number of decades. However, reading that DNA is harder than the nuclear DNA. That is because there are multiple copies of the DNA in individual mitochondria as well as there being more than one mitochondrion in most cells. However, science has now developed techniques for analysing the mitochondrial DNA in quite subtle detail. In 2024 a number of interesting papers were produced which I will talk about in this post The rate and nature of mitochondrial DNA mutations in human pedigrees is paper produced by a number of researchers in Iceland. The abstract states: We examined the rate and nature of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) mutations in humans using sequence data from 64,806 contemporary Icelanders from 2,548 matrilines. Based on 116,663 mother-child transmissions, 8,199 mutations were detected, providing robust rate estimates by nucleotide type, functional impact, position, and different alleles at the same position...