Volume 29, No 10, Oct 2019

ISSN: 1001-0602 
EISSN: 1748-7838 2018 
impact factor 17.848* 
(Clarivate Analytics, 2019)

Volume 29 Issue 10, October 2019: 781-782

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS

De-fusing mitochondria defuses the mtDNA time-bomb

Patrick F. Chinnery ^1,2 and Julien Prudent ¹

¹MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 0XY, UK and ² Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Cambridge, Cambridge Biomedical Campus, Cambridge CB2 0QQ, UK
Correspondence: Patrick F. Chinnery (pfc25@cam.ac.uk)

Being uniparentally inherited and with a high mutation rate, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) should relentlessly acquire mutations, eventually destroying a species through “mutational meltdown”. Lieber et al. now show that mitochondrial fragmentation is an essential first step in Drosophila , preventing functional complementation by wild-type molecules, and packaging mutations into mitochondria before they are destroyed by mitophagy.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41422-019-0206-z

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