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In the 1990s, French scientists wanted to see what happened to a mouse brain when they messed with the creature's mitochondria, the structures that generate energy inside most complex cells. The team looked at two mouse strains, called H and N, that carry slightly different mitochondrial-DNA sequences.
It was clear that the H mice learned to navigate mazes faster than their N cousins, but when the team swapped the mitochondria — creating H mice with N mitochondria and N mice with H mitochondria — their performance changed. Mitochondria from N seemed to slow down the learning process for H mice. N mice, meanwhile, improved slightly with H mitochondria[1]. And the team, led by geneticist Pierre Roubertoux at INSERM, the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research in Marseilles, found other changes in behaviour, and in brain anatomy, too.
The results came as a surprise, because such differences between mitochondrial genomes were seen as neutral — having no biological effect. “The long-held view was that the genetic variation we find within the mitochondrial genome doesn't affect function,” says...