An Interesting View of Mitochondrial Damage and Disease

Mitochondria are the bacteria-like power plants of the cell, thousands to each cell, and each mitochondrion bearing its own DNA separate from that in the cell nucleus. Damage to this DNA is important in aging, and in a variety of diseases. Mitochondrial disease and mitochondrial contributions to degenerative aging are two very different things, however, for all that they both involve damage to mitochondrial DNA. In mitochondrial disease most of a patient's mitochondria have the same form of mutational damage, inherited from the mother or generated very early in embryonic growth. In aging the damage is random between cells, but there are certain forms of mutational damage that become amplified because they make a damaged mitochondrion more likely to survive and replicate in comparison to its undamaged peers.

Here is an interesting, albeit minority view on mitochondrial damage and how cells respond to it. It is of more relevance to mitochondrial disease, but there are aspects of it that might be informative with respect to cells in old tissues overtaken by damaged, dysfunctional mitochondria:

The new research shows that small changes in the ratio of mutant to normal mitochondrial DNA within the thousands of mitochondrial DNAs inside each cell can cause abrupt changes in the expression of numerous genes within the nuclear DNA. "By showing that subtle changes in the cellular proportion of the same mitochondrial DNA mutation can result in a wide range of different clinical manif...

Source: Fight Aging! - October 27, 2014 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs