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Cells are swapping their mitochondria. What does this mean for our health?
Researchers are studying why the energy factories are moving between cells and whether the process can be harnessed to treat cancer and other diseases.
Around 1.5 billion years ago, this drifting bacterium was swallowed up by the microbe that eventually gave rise to eukaryotes — the large group of organisms, including us, whose cells have an enclosed nucleus. Last year, Minghao Zheng, a regenerative biologist at the University of Western Australia in Perth, and his colleagues discovered that some types of astrocyte donate their mitochondria to cells that line blood vessels in the mouse brain 8. The lack of detail about why cells transfer their mitochondria makes it hard to know what specific role these cellular exchanges might have in conditions such as cardiovascular disease and obesity, says Rodriguez.
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