(Medical Xpress)—The risk of a child to inherit mitochondrial diseases – i. e. malfunction in what is usually referred to as the power plants of the cell – is largely decided when the future mother herself is still an embryo. This according to a novel study by scientists at Karolinska Institutet and the Max Planck Institute in Germany, which is published in the journal Nature Genetics.
Mitochondria are small structures within almost every cell in the body, responsible mainly for energy production and fat metabolism. Their function is very important, and they contain their own genome, called mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). The mitochondrial genome is inherited via the mother, where hundreds of thousands of mtDNA copies are packed in the female germ cell. Read full article.
