This Pathway May be the Secret to Mitochondria Health | How to Turn it ON

Imagine there is a 27/4 factory constantly churning out energy to power a local town, but with it comes the natural, yet unfortunate byproduct of pollution. Over time this factory becomes less efficient with the ratio of energy-to-pollution becoming less and less practical….

Wouldn’t it be nice to just decommission this plant, and use its parts to build a new, more efficient energy station? I think we’d all agree, that’d be a solid option.

Now, lets take this scenario and scale it to a city. With hundreds of power plants all operating at efficiency levels based on how well their workers maintain them. Meaning, their energy-to-pollution ratio (aka efficiency levels) are all over the place. Making it an extremely complex task to figure out which plants should be decommissioned and when. Unless of course, there was an overseeing body to audit and prioritize this process. Which, would seem like a pretty easy thing for us humans to do, in fact we do it across many industries today! Which brings us to…

The third twist in this scenario, imagine all of this is happening within every single one of your cells right now, because frankly, it is! With each power plant being your mitochondria and the city it’s supporting being all of the cells thousands of operations each second. And as time goes by, and the environment changes, so do their energy-to-pollution (ATP-to-Free Radical) ratios. Leaving the cell(s) with a problem…

How can it tell which mitochondria should be decommissioned (recycled via a process called “Mitophagy”) and which ones are good to keep churning…. Well, biology once again has come-up with an elegant solution….

Let’s Explore….