Dr. Martin Picard

That's how babies survived.

And that would be a catastrophe.

So, you know, it's probably a good system to have baby metabolism match pretty closely.

because they have the same mitochondria as the mom, to mom metabolism.

So that's, I think, a loose hypothesis, but it makes a lot of sense.

It does make a lot of sense.

Every mitochondria you have in your body, like the brain mitochondria, neuron mitochondria, astrocyte mitochondria, whatever your favorite cell type is, your heart mitochondria, liver mitochondria, muscle mitochondria, they're very different.

And now we have a new method.

There's a wonderful scientist in our group, Anna Monzel,

who's developed a method to profile different types of mitochondria.

We call this mitotyping.

The same way that now in neuroscience or in immunology, it makes no sense to talk about a brain cell or like an immune cell.

If you're a self-respecting immunologist, you know your cell types and there's at least 30 different types.

So I think we're at this point in mitochondrial science

where we need to adopt a similar level of specificity.

There are different types of mitochondria.

We call those mitotypes.

And they emerge, all of them, from the same mitotype in the egg, right?

The egg that the mother carries and releases from the ovary.

There's about half a million mitochondria in that egg.