Tag Archives: organelle

Berkeley Lab Scientists Help Develop Promising Therapy for Huntington’s Disease

Initial results in mice could lead to new way to fight neurodegenerative diseases

There’s new hope in the fight against Huntington’s disease. A group of researchers that includes scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have designed a compound that suppresses symptoms of the devastating disease in mice.

The compound is a synthetic antioxidant that targets mitochondria, an organelle within cells that serves as a cell’s power plant. Oxidative damage to mitochondria is implicated in many neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s. (more…)

Read More

Researcher Discovers Mitochondria Share an Ancestor with SAR11

Billions of years ago, an astounding evolutionary event occurred: certain bacteria became obliged to live inside other cells, thus starting a chain of events that resulted in what is now the mitochondria, an organelle found in all eukaryotic cells.  A recent study by researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and the Oregon State University (OSU) provides strong evidence that mitochondria share a common evolutionary ancestor with a lineage of marine bacteria known as SAR11, arguably the most abundant group of microorganisms on Earth.

“This is a very exciting discovery,” said Michael Rappe, Associate Researcher at the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology in the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) at UH Mānoa.  “The results that we present make sense in a lot of ways: the physiology of SAR11 makes them more apt to be dependent on other organisms, and based on the contemporary abundance of SAR11 in the global ocean, the ancestral lineage may have also been abundant in the ancient ocean, increasing encounters between this bacterial lineage with the host of the original symbiosis event.” (more…)

Read More