Mitochondria 2.0?
I've had a thought that's been eating at my brain for years and always wondered why it couldn't work. I can't write up a big thing right now (exam tomorrow) but this has been bugging me so I'd love to get your thoughts. Mitochondria ended up in the cell by being eaten basically, but the cell kept them. I read a paper a while ago about someone who infected cells with a bacteria, but in a way so they both survive. So the idea is, could you add something like mitochondria? Modify a bacteria with a property you want to not interfere with the cell and divide slowly, only as fast as is needed to keep up numbers between cycles. Give the cells a new function and whole set of proteins to make use of just by adding in a new "organelle". In theory if you did it to a germ line cell and propagated it enough you could recreate that event but also make neat cells
Thoughts?
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Wiki page to save everyone else 3 minutes of googling.
Seems interesting.
One of the main issues I foresee is mutations - if you engineer a "useful" organelle using bacteria as the basis and make it easily get inside human cells, what happens if the "useful" functionality is mutated out and it starts dumping toxins like any traditional pathogenic bacteria?
Evolution is an alien god, read this article to see why you should treat it with great respect:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/l8/conjuring_an_evolution_to_serve_you/
The bacteria responsible for q fever is possible. It does done bad bad shit, but only in about 50% of people.
There are even some intracellular fungi, but no appropriate ones come to mind.
The relationship between mitochondria and the nucleus of a cell is pretty complex though. The majority of the DNA for mitochondrial proteins is in the nucleus of the cell I believe and not actually from the mDNA.
Myostatin Inhibition. One should choose a bacteria as they are far easier to work with than something like Taxo. Also, an optimal choice would be susceptible to a particular antibiotic.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC90216/