Congratulations Anne Marie!!!! 🥳🥳

…we know that if you artificially increase mtDNA amount so every mito has some, the plant suffers (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...) and it also may be linked to recombination- plant mtDNA recombines much more readily than metazoan mtDNA- compartmentalising may keep this at bay!

It is wild! It’s hypothesised that this is an outcome of the constant fission/fusion these guys go through- they can share their contents (www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....), so may share proteins/equilibrate upon fusion. As for specific purpose, it’s still hypothetical but….

Thank you to David Macherel, Jose Gualberto and Hakim Mireau for organizing the 2024 ICPMB meeting and the special issue of Phys. Plant. And to Olivier Keech, Allan Rassumsson and Olivier Van Aken for organizing the 2022 ICPMB meeting where I first met Joanna and the seeds of this work germinated.

Thanks Sjon!! 😄😊

Thanks Rory 😄😄😄

#plantscience

A huge thank you to @achristensenphd.bsky.social‬ for supporting me and believing in this project, and @AltartouriB from @BiotechUNL (both on X) for help advising and helping the imaging experiments, as well as wonderful undergraduates Maddy and Alora. Feedback/discussions always welcome!!(9/9)

So, the big question is why do these mitochondria behave differently if they do or do not have mtDNA? Mitochondria may differ in their receptivity to other individuals based on their genome content… we go into much more detail in the discussion, and the debate is still open!(8/9)

During this work, I developed a ubiquitous, photoconvertible, stable mtDNA marker for plants based on the bacterial H-NS protein, developed in human lines by @mitomorph.bsky.social I hope this tool will be of great help to the plant mitochondrial community!(7/9)