A MAN who suffers from muscle weakness has dealt a powerful blow to two long-held dogmas in human genetics. He is living proof that processes which hundreds of scientific papers assume never happen do in fact take place.
Doctors found that this man’s muscles tire easily because they contain mutant mitochondria, the energy-producing structures inside cells. What astonished them, however, is that most of his muscle mitochondria come from his father, shattering the notion that mitochondria are always inherited from the mother. Sperm are packed with mitochondria (pictured), but until now it was thought these are always destroyed after fertilisation.…
