People need to sleep, and sleep deprivation can cause many changes in the brain. But we have a poor understanding of why sleep is so crucial. New research has examined a fruit fly model to assess how ...

Elizabeth Jonas first got interested in mitochondria by chance. In 1995, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Yale, working at the Marine Biological Lab in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where she was ...

Mitochondria are often described as the cell’s power plants, because they convert food - glucose and fat - into energy that the cell can use. To help them achieve this, mitochondria carry their own ...

Researchers have uncovered that mitochondria divide into two distinct forms when cells are starved, a finding that could help explain how some cancers thrive in hostile conditions. Mitochondria are ...

New genomic studies show that hydrogenosomes, hydrogen‑producing organelles in some anaerobic eukaryotes, have evolved multiple times from mitochondria through gene transfer and loss. Research on ...

Many of us remember from high school biology class that mitochondria are the cell's "power plants." These small kidney-bean-shaped structures are what convert nutrients from food into ATP—the cell's ...

An evolutionary trait of humans and most animals is that they inherit mitochondrial DNA exclusively from the mother, even though the father's spermatozoa have mitochondria. If spermatozoa have ...