Top 10 Mitochondria Quotes & Sayings

Although separating mitochondria and microsomes might appear worlds apart from the determination of the molecular weight of macromolecules, certain concepts were common to the two operations and could be usefully transposed from the latter to the former.

I knew the lysosomes and peroxisomes because I had discovered them; I knew the mitochondria because I was interested in them. I knew the membrane system because my friend, George Palade, had worked on that.

Over the long term, symbiosis is more useful than parasitism. More fun, too. Ask any mitochondria.

My mitochondria comprise a very large proportion of me. I cannot do the calculation, but I suppose there is almost as much of them in sheer dry bulk as there is the rest of me. Looked at in this way, I could be taken for a very large, motile colony of respiring bacteria, operating a complex system of nuclei, microtubules, and neurons for the pleasure and sustenance of their families, and running, at the moment, a typewriter.

I try to think up material that might apply to the subjects they are studying. How many mitochondria does it take to power a cell? One. Because mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell. Not ready for prime time, that one.

We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.

These studies resulted eventually in a complete sequence analysis of the complex from several species, and in the atomic resolution structure of the F catalytic domain of the enzyme from bovine mitochondria, giving new insights into how ATP is made in the biological world.

Small bodies, about half a micron in diameter, and later referred to under the name of 'mitochondria' were detected under the light microscope as early as 1894.

Studies in the emerging field of cellular bioenergetics, a branch of biochemistry concerned with how energy flows through living systems, suggest that molecules from orchids might be able to repair decaying mitochondria, the powerhouses of cells, in humans.

We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not ours.