the.com/mitochondria
the cell's power plant that was once a separate creature you swallowed whole.
means The tiny organelles inside your cells that generate most of the energy (ATP) your body runs on.
from From Greek 'mitos' (thread) plus 'chondrion' (little grain), coined by a German scientist in the late 19th century who peered through a microscope and saw what looked like threadlike grains scattered in the cell. The name stuck even as we learned these grains were once free-living bacteria, swallowed by an ancestral cell long ago and never spat back out — they still carry their own scrap of DNA as proof of their independent past.
- own dna
- Carries its own genome, separate from yours
- maternal only
- Inherited exclusively from your mother
- ancient takeover
- Was a free-living bacterium two billion years ago
- energy factory
- Produces nearly all your body's ATP
- varies wildly
- Egg cells pack hundreds of thousands