(Medical Xpress)—In the epic series Star Wars, the mysterious energy field known simply as, the Force, was communicated by microscopic endosymbionts known as midichlorians. Their real world counterparts, the mitochondria, are increasingly seen as the main players in almost all of the important functions of a cell. In his popular 2005 book, Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the meaning of Life, Nick Lane established that the need for genetic error correction in mitochondria belies much of their seemingly inexhaustible obsession with fission, fusion, and apoptosis. A paper just published in the Journal of Cell Science by a group in Estonia has applied automated tracking techniques to put some real numbers on all this mitochondrial fuss and maneuver, and gives us some insight as to what might be going on inside the cell.
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