Eukaryotic cells have many specialized complexes and organelles that perform crucial functions. Mitochondria are well known organelles that are critical energy generators, often called the powerhouses ...

In most eukaryotes, the inheritance of mitochondrion and its DNA (mtDNA) is strictly maternal, despite the fact that a spermatozoon can inject up to 100 functional mitochondria into the oocyte during ...

Doubly uniparental inheritance (DUI) of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) represents a rare and intriguing deviation from the standard model of strictly maternal inheritance. In bivalves, DUI manifests as the ...

The 100 or so organelles in sperm are swamped by hundreds of thousands of mitochondria embedded in each egg cell — each carrying the 37 genes in mitochondrial DNA. The contribution of only maternal ...

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 ...

Recombination occurs in human mitochondrial DNA, says a team from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, Boston, in a “proof of concept” paper in Science this week that ...

David Rand, a professor of natural history at Brown University, explains how studying mitochondria — the cell's energy producers — offers a useful way to understand complex gene-by-gene or ...

In September 6 Nature, Sofia Berlin and Hans Ellegren from Uppsala University, Sweden, examine the controversial clonal inheritance theory for vertebrate mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) by following ...