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

There’s unexpected movement in the world of cell biology — specifically, with the energy factories known as mitochondria. Ever since they were discovered in the mid-nineteenth century, mitochondria have been known as organelles that reside inside cells. But that textbook picture now seems to be wrong. An explosion of research is challenging mitochondria’s long-standing image as exclusively cellular organelles. “They may be a multicellular organelle,” says Jonathan Brestoff, an immunologist who studies metabolism at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. In other words, the supposedly static energy factories now seem to be expert travellers, skipping from one cell to another on demand. Cancer cells ‘poison’ the immune system with tainted mitochondria This ‘mitochondrial transfer’ has been observed in a wide variety of cells and in organisms as diverse as yeast, molluscs and rodents. “It’s really exciting to see,” says Jeffrey Spees, a stem-cell biologist at the University of V ... Read full article.