RE: What do you know today that you didn't know yesterday?
January 31, 2024 at 9:39 pm
(This post was last modified: January 31, 2024 at 10:01 pm by Anomalocaris.)
this the concept or “mitochondria eve” relies on the supposition that all mitochondria in human cells are inherited from the mother. However, while it is indisputably true that vast majority of each person mitochondria is inherited from the mother, there is actually no work that would systematically exclude the possibility that some proportion of the mitochondria is, in fact, inherited from the father. What is known is sperm cells have 40 or 50 mitochondria. During fertilization, these mitochondria enter the egg cell, and what happened to them afterwards has never been satisfactory explained. An unfertilized egg cells is crammed full of mitochondria. Each egg cell having between 50,000 and 100,000 mitochondria. So egg mitochondria would outnumber sperm mitochondria in the fertilized egg 1000 to one. In fact, if one out of every thousand mitochondria in each human body did have a different parentage than the rest, that will be below the detection threshold of any method that has yet been applied to examine the problem.