Beyond The Disease, September 3, 2025

In Mitochondria in Space MitoWorld’s Alexander Sercel reports on a recent preprint publication which meta-analyzes biological data from animals and humans exposed to spaceflight to understand the impacts of space exposure on mitochondrial functions and reveal potential therapeutic avenues to protect astronaut mitochondria in the future. Includes interviews with Chris Mason (WorldQuant Professor, Weill Cornell Medicine) and Afshin Beheshti (Director of Center for Space Biomedicine, University of Pittsburgh).

In How Evolution Shapes the OxPhos Machinery: New Insights from Structural and Genomic Analysis, MitoWorld’s Dane Wolf reports on a paper a published in Cell Genomics, from the lab of José Antonio Enríquez, charting fundamental evolutionary processes in shaping the nearly 100 subunits of the respiratory chain, required for the production of ATP inside mitochondria, providing new insights into how the oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) system coordinates the expression and assembly of proteins from the cell’s two genomes.

In Old Mitochondrial Are a Factor in Cell Fate Decisions, MitoWorld editor Gary Howard summarizes a new paper published in Nature Metabolism by Pekka Katajisto at the University of Helsinki. The paper showed that asymmetric cell divisions concentrate older mitochondria in cells that are more efficient in producing stem cells to repopulate critical areas.

In Turning Off Translation of Mitochondrial Genes, MitoWorld editor Gary Howard describes a new paper in Science by Luis Cruz-Zaragoza and Peter Rehling at the University Medical Center Göttingen. The paper explored how the nuclear and mitochondrial genomes interact.

In Mitochondrial DNA Mutations and Cancer, MitoWorld editor Gary Howard summarizes a new paper from Mondira Kundu at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital that was published in Science Advances. The study showed how a moderate burden of mitochondrial DNA mutations can enhance the development of leukemia.