Nick Lane

It's just that a single bacterial cell has much less in it, but there's so many different types of bacterial cell that overall, they've kind of explored genetic sequence space.

They had four billion years to have a go at that, and they never came up with a trick, which says it's not in the genes.

It's not about information.

There's something else which is controlling it.

And that's something I think is the acquisition of these power packs in our cells called mitochondria.

Yeah.

I mean, I'll tell you how I got there first, because I started out working on mitochondria, and that took me into the evolution of eukaryotes.

And eukaryotes acquire these endosymbionts that become mitochondria, and they change the potential of evolution.

It doesn't change everything immediately, but it changes where the endpoints can be.

Yeah.

And it allows the evolution of these large complex cells and eventually multicellular organisms and us.

So what are mitochondria actually doing?

Well, what they're actually doing is respiration.

They're generating energy for cells.

They're doing plenty of other things as well.

But the main thing we can think about is they're the energy producers.

And they're derived from bacteria and bacteria produce their energy in exactly the same way.

They're generating energy by generating an electrical charge on the membrane.

And that charge, it's small, but the membrane is really thin.

So the charge is about 150 to 200 millivolts.