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A comment on UK to allow babies from three people. Parent comment

Re:UK to allow babies from three people by Crito on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @08:34PM (#8994812)
How do mitochondria replicate their own DNA? Do they somehow have the rest of the cell do it, or do they contain/produce and use all of the necessary enzymes/proteins/base-pairs/etc to do it by themselves?

The relationship between them and their host cell almost seems similar to ant-fungus mutualism.

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Re:UK to allow babies from three people by jforman on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @09:18PM (#8994953)
All of the DNA replication machinery that operates in mitochondria is encoded in the nucleus, translated in the cytoplasm, and then transported into the mitochondrion:

"The remaining ~1500 mitochondrial proteins are encoded in the nucleus, including all proteins needed for replication and expression of the small mtDNA genome (Falkenberg et al., 2007)"

from http://ac.els-cdn.com/S0092867409012458/1-s2.0-S009286740901...

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Re:UK to allow babies from three people by schoen on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @08:42PM (#8994848)
This is actually a now-standard theory of the origin of mitochondria (that they were originally separate organisms):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiogenesis

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