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Mitochondria Are Alive
The physical world is an intricate dance between matter, information, and energy. Recognizing that mitochondria are alive will open new horizons into how we learn about, and build with, biology.
Physicists Erwin Schrödinger and Ilya Prigogine said that living organisms maintain order despite the universe's tendency towards increasing entropy, a measure of how dispersed or disordered the energy within a system is. From a thermodynamic perspective, mitochondria take in low-entropy inputs from their host cell, such as glucose or fatty acids, and expel high-entropy outputs, including carbon dioxide and water. Mitochondria also pump out protons through their inner membrane to maintain an out-of-equilibrium thermodynamic balance, using the resulting gradient to produce the ATP molecules that fuel cellular functions, from DNA replication to protein synthesis.
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