Dr. Martin Picard

And then those mitochondria, there's a single type of mitochondria in there.

And then when it's fertilized, development happens in this beautiful process.

And through that process, as the heart starts to form, the brain starts to form, the muscles start to form, the mitochondria differentiate.

And then you end up with different types of mitochondria that are adapted and matched to the different demands of cell types, of organs.

And one way we think about this is I think it's

it makes a lot of sense to think about mitochondria as social organisms.

And there are multiple features of mitochondrial biology that obey what behavioral social scientists classify as social.

If you study ants, for example, there's a few rules that we know ants are social creatures because they form groups and there are different types.

There's division of labor.

You have worker ants that work really hard, and you have warrior ants that are really chubby, and they're here to defend the hive.

They like to fight.

Yeah, exactly.

So those two types of ants, you look at them side by side, there's this little flimsy, super active worker ant, and then this chubby warrior ant.

Genetically, they're identical.

They have the same genome.

They came as a little larvae from the queen, but their morphology is super different.

Their behavior is very different, but through development, their cues are different.

apply it to the different larvae, and then they end up becoming a worker or a worrier.

So the same kind of thing happens in mitochondria.

So there are different types of mitochondria, like the two types of ants.