Beyond Energy Production – Mitochondria Drive Cellular Function
Energy is the fundamental currency of existence because it is the absolute prerequisite for any dynamic biological process, including life itself. Not a single event happens in the body that does not require energy. Reading this article, listening to music, sleeping, eating, yawning, and working all require energy.
This energy is generated by the mitochondria, which function both as power generators and sentinels of the cell. Humans, animals, plants, and most single-celled organisms (eukaryotes) have mitochondria in the cells (as shown below).
Mitochondria, Essential for Life and Functioning
The mitochondria produce 90-95% of the energy needed to fuel biological processes in the human body, including:
- Promoting metabolism
- Supporting the brain function
- Powering skeletal muscles
- Managing cellular repair
- Maintaining the immune system
- Keeping the body healthy
- Keeping the body alive
In addition, the mitochondria drive health by managing the following processes:
- Electrochemical gradients from nerve function to immune modulation
- Oxidative stress, antioxidant defenses to facilitate healing, not causing long-term damage
- Communication
- Adaptability
- Cellular balance and response
- Cell fate (survival versus apoptosis)
- Immune responses
- Inflammation and repair
If all processes, including health, are fueled by energy, then it is clear that every pathology in some way or another is a failure, or a collapse, of the energy system.
Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it.
…This is not philosophy, this is physics – Albert Einstein
Ultimately, the distinction between a living and dead organism lies not in the presence of energy, but in the body’s ability to use it. Hormones and other endogenously produced signaling molecules require energy to synthesize and carry out internal regulation–a continuous expenditure that is, in fact, what keeps an organism alive.
Another way to think about the relationship between energy and the functioning of the body is to understand what happens when the body experiences endogenous or exogenous insults. An insult could be a simple cut on the skin or a traumatic spinal cord injury. It could also be endogenous, relating to a gene mutation or any other disruption due to continuous or chronic infection. Typically, the body immediately responds to the insult by providing energy at the site of the insult: without energy, there can be no response.
The critical role of the mitochondria is to provide the response energy.
It may not be radical to say that genes are not the blueprint of life because in the absence of energy, genes can do nothing. A dead body still has all its genome intact. Genes are merely information storage molecules; they act as a biological blueprint to perform any active function, such as transcribing into RNA, translating proteins, or regulating cellular activity.
To perform any biological function, the genes require a constant supply of energy in the form of ATP, the energy molecule generated by the mitochondria.
Amazing Discoveries About the Mitochondria
An adult human has approximately 100,000 trillion mitochondria, whose job is to produce energy in the form of ATP, with the average cell using 10 billion ATP per day. Interestingly, ATP cannot be stored; it must be produced every second of every day. A healthy person at rest produces their body weight in ATP every day.
Mitochondria are ancient bacteria that were engulfed by a host cell over 1.5 billion years ago and the host cell and this bacterium formed a symbiotic relationship where the bacteria generated energy and the host cell provided nutrients and protection. The ancient bacterial origins of mitochondria and their symbiotic relationship was first hypothesised by the evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis.
Recent research shows that not only are the mitochondria different in various organs, but they can also change morphologically in shape and size within cells; even their alignment in the cell changes. Interestingly, their alignment in the cell is also in synchronicity with our body’s magnetic systems. When humans go to space, their mitochondria actually get disoriented because they no longer have the magnetic system to align them within the cells. This alignment is not happenstance. It happens because within that alignment lies the foundation of quantum physics.
These alignments provide synchronous opportunities for membrane potentials to create ATP energy, drive calcium and protein transport, signal cellular health, and store energy.
Video Source: Trans-mitochondrial coordination of cristae at regulated membrane junctions. Martin Picard et al (2015), Nature Communications http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms7259.
The mitochondria also spontaneously emit light in the form of ultra-weak photon emissions.
The mitochondria are wired to the nucleus, meaning they are physically connected to the nucleus with what are called Mitochondria-Associated Membranes (MAMs). The degree of this association is relevant to health, and the morphology of the mitochondria that is attached to the nucleus is relevant to health and wellbeing.
Ignoring Energy and Focusing on Symptoms, Not Systems
Modern medicine has conditioned us to think about symptoms of disease and changes in biomarkers rather than understanding the phenomenology that is health.
The focus on symptoms, which are the outcomes of the fundamental pathology, means that there is little or no understanding that there is a disruption of an energy system and of the energy flow. This reductionist approach centers the fixing of disease around therapies aimed at molecular pathways.
For example, in Type 2 diabetes, treatment often focuses on lowering blood sugar by increasing insulin through injections or drugs that increase insulin secretion. But in many cases, insulin levels are already elevated. This approach ignores the real problem–insulin resistance, which occurs when cells fail to respond properly to the insulin that is already present. Adding more insulin may provide a short-term solution, but it doesn’t address the underlying resistance, which may result from exogenous insults, chronic inflammation, or failure of endogenous structures in the cell’s insulin signaling mechanisms.
Another example is Alzheimer’s disease, which accounts for approximately 70% of dementia cases globally. Recent research shows that the formation of plaque in the brain could be a consequence of mitochondrial dysfunction (increased oxidative stress, suboptimal mitophagy, etc.) and not of aging, lifestyle, or habits.
Internal Repair Systems Regulated by the Mitochondria
To understand how biological processes and health are fueled by the bioenergetics system, let’s take the example of how exercise creates the muscle-building protein follistatin.
Key questions to consider:
- How does exercise build muscle?
- Why is muscle built by the act of exercising?
- When does the body decide it needs to stop making more muscle?
The short answer is that your internal system has a repair mechanism that is regulated by the mitochondria.
During exercise, micro tears are created in the muscles. Electron microscopy analysis shows that the mitochondria rush to these micro tears to repair them. The mitochondria induce follistatin – the muscle-building protein – to bridge the splits, and through this bridging, the muscle grows.
Essentially, the mitochondria have recognized an acute stress signal and guided the DNA to release the follistatin to fix the micro tears. Once the tears were fixed, the repair process was turned off. Both the signaling and the energy were controlled by the mitochondria.
What happens when we begin to age or to experience constant endogenous or exogenous stressors?
In the early years and until age 21, the body has the capacity to fix acute stresses quickly as new and healthy mitochondria are being created. After the age 21, every decade, the body begins to lose 10-15% of its mitochondria permanently. The loss of mitochondria, coupled with external stressors, such as pollution, the environment, poor nutrition, and other insults, also causes the quality of the mitochondria to degrade (become damaged and dysfunctional), which leads to a decrease in the production of energy.
Recovery and repair are fast in younger years, as there is enough energy to complete the healing and recovery, but as individuals reach their 60s, the internal energy system is not producing enough energy to quickly deal with this type of acute trauma. The acute inflammation starts to become chronic. (A good read on this blog: What is Inflammation and how Mitochondria combat Chronic Inflammation.)
It is important to understand that it is energy that provides the reliability of response. With sufficient energy, one can be reasonably healthy and have resilience to recover from acute stressors and infections. Or, perhaps, in the case of chronic stressors, a better quality of life.
Trifecta of Mitochondria, Nutrition, and Exercise
For the mitochondria to generate the energy, they require good nutrition, which serves as the fuel, and exercise, which creates new healthy mitochondria.
The ingested nutrition is processed by the microbiome of microorganisms (bacteria, viruses, fungi, and archaea) that live in the gut. Therefore, having a healthy gut is also important for processing the nutrition consumed into fuel for the mitochondria.
Poor nutrition and the lack of exercise can reduce the amount of energy produced by the mitochondria, leading to a downward spiral of bioenergetics. More and better quality mitochondria provide more energy, which leads to an upward bioenergetics cycle in the body. Improved bioenergetics means improved cellular function in every part of the body.
A great example of the importance of nutrition is to consider desert plants that stay dormant or as seeds for tens of years due to a lack of water (nutrition). The moment it rains, plants germinate and start their life cycle.
Growth, aging, resiliency, and recovery are all deeply connected with energy for both plants and animals.
Aging as a Deficit of Mitochondrial Energy
After understanding the role of mitochondria and bioenergetics, aging could be defined as a deficit of energy.
This deficit results in the inability of the body to maintain the biological network and prevent biological structural collapse. How this happens is explained in another article and video on this blog: Cell Danger Response & Mitochondria – A Presentation by Dr. Robert Naviaux.
References
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- Georgetown University Medical Center. “Space travel can adversely impact energy production in a cell.” ScienceDaily.
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