Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is an essential multicopy genome, compacted into protein-DNA clusters called nucleoids. Maintaining an adequate mtDNA copy number is crucial for cellular viability. Loss of mtDNA results in severe human syndromes, whereas increased mtDNA copy number has been suggested to improve survival from myocardial infarction in mice and to be a promising therapeutic strategy for ...

Large-scale mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) deletions are an important cause of mitochondrial disease, while somatic mtDNA deletions cause focal respiratory chain deficiency associated with ageing and neurodegenerative disorders. As mtDNA deletions only cause cellular pathology at high levels of mtDNA heteroplasmy, an mtDNA deletion must accumulate to levels which can result in biochemical dysfunctio...

Qualitative and quantitative changes in mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) have been shown to be common causes of inherited neurodegenerative and muscular diseases, and have also been implicated in ageing. These diseases can be caused by primary mtDNA mutations, or by defects in nuclear-encoded mtDNA maintenance proteins that cause secondary mtDNA mutagenesis or instability. Furthermore, it has been pro...

A number of alternations in mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) have been reported in different types of cancers, and the role of mtDNA in cancer has been attracting increasing interest. In order to investigate the relationship between mtDNA alternations and chemosensitivity, we constructed cybrid (trans-mitochondrial hybrid) cell lines carrying a HeLa nucleus and the mtDNA of healthy individuals because...

alzheimer’s disease (ad) is the most common form of dementia in the elderly in which interplay between genes and the environment is supposed to be involved. mitochondrial dna (mtdna) has the only non-coding regions at the displacement loop (d-loop) region that contains two hypervariable segments (hvs-i and hvs-ii) with high polymorphism. mtdna has already been fully sequenced and many subsequen...

Nuclear mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) segments (NUMTs) were discovered shortly after sequencing the first human genome. They have earlier been considered to represent archaic elements of ancient insertion events, but modern technologies and growing databases mtDNA NUMT sequences confirm that they are abundant some them phylogenetically young. Here, we build upon mtDNA/NUMT review articles published...

Abstract Molecular techniques are powerful tools that can address many research problems in insect ecology. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is a widely used molecular marker. It easy to use and has favorable biological properties, such as near-neutrality, lack of recombination, clock-like evolutionary rate. However, there some issues involved when using mtDNA data population genetics, species delimit...

Mitochondrial diseases include a group of maternally inherited genetic disorders caused by mutations in mtDNA. In most of these patients, mutated mtDNA coexists with wild-type mtDNA, a situation known as mtDNA heteroplasmy. Here, we report on a strategy toward preventing germline transmission of mitochondrial diseases by inducing mtDNA heteroplasmy shift through the selective elimination of mut...

Several reports have shown that individual mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) deletions accumulate with age. However, the overall extent of somatic mtDNA damage with age remains unclear. We have utilized full-length PCR to concurrently screen for multiple mtDNA rearrangements in total DNA extracted from skeletal muscle derived from physiologically normal individuals (n = 35). This revealed that both the...