What a great title for a book. Here's a review of Nick Lane's latest from the March 31st edition of Science (subscription required). From the review:
Lane [a science writer whose previous book Oxygen (1) was well received and whose doctoral research involved free radicals and mitochondrial function in organ transplants] is clearly fascinated with the origin of the eukaryotic cell. He devotes considerable attention to (frequently controversial) theories for that origin as well as to the beginnings of life itself and to the ways in which mitochondria have subsequently evolved within the cell. He supports the "hydrogen hypothesis" of William Martin and Miklós Müller (2), who proposed that the original symbiosis occurred not between an invading bacterium and a nonrespiring eukaryote but rather between a primitive purple bacterium that emitted hydrogen and carbon dioxide and a methanogen that could use these end products to generate energy. Lane goes on to discuss the subsequent transfer of genes from mitochondrion to nucleus along with the idea that the residual mitochondrial-encoded proteins serve as scaffolding for the assembly of the respiratory chain complexes from nuclear genes.
I'm attending my first candidacy exam today. That reminded me of my candidacy exam so many years ago. One of my proposals was on mitochondrial inheritance. Fascinating stuff. I was explaining to my wife how mitochondrial DNA can be used to trace human origins and she thought that "it is all so complicated, so intricate, so ... perfect. There must be a god." She was being sarcastic with the last sentence.
You must be joking. That was my first project as a rotation student in Liza Pon's lab. Got a cool paper out of it (although all the follow up experiments were done by a postdoc who got the first authorship).
Hyeong-Cheol Yang, Alexander Palazzo, Theresa C. Swayne and Liza A. Pon. A retention mechanism for distribution of mitochondria during cell division in budding yeast.
Current Biology (1999) 9:1111-1116