Dr. Martin Picard

So you're creating information by patterning in time, by patterning electricity.

So mitochondria, the way I see them is they're kind of an energy patterning system.

And we've called them the mitochondrial information processing system for that reason.

I think it's a decent analogy for part of their behavior, part of what they do fundamentally.

They take raw energy and then they pattern that energy into molecules.

Correct.

And they're controlling the flow of energy, but they're also controlling the transformation of energy, right?

The electricity, you know, can be...

converted, transformed into all sorts of different messages, signals, right, with your Morse code, depending on the needs, depending on the state, depending on the person pressing, releasing the lever.

And sometimes the organism needs a lot of ATP.

If you're a mitochondrion and you live in the heart, and your job is to make ATP, a lot of ATP, and then there's side jobs.

If you're a mitochondrion in the liver, your job is very different.

And you're a very different kind of mitochondrion.

Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Yeah.

Organelle is the technical term for an organ of the cell.

The cell typically is represented as this skin, and then inside the skin is the cytoplasm, the big soup.

And then inside the soup, the cytoplasm, there is a bunch of little organs that allow the cell to do all sorts of things and perform its activities and replicate and so on.

Mitochondria is one of those organs.