That does not mean that other lifeforms in different planets require mitochondria or equivalent organelles. As long as they can perform the necessary chemical reactions (which could be different in a different environments) and extract enough energy, they should be good.
How did mitochondria evolve in the first place? Could they have remained as independent organisms and use their massive energy budget to evolve independently?
That mitochondria are conserved as an independent organelle across almost [1] all eukaryotes, across billions of years of history, suggests this is something the nuclear can’t easily in house.
That could also suggest that any other strategies were just out competed by this one and lost the opportunity to develop further.
Absolutely. It also means--however--that any niche where alternative did exist, when exposed to mitochondrial life, they lost.
Now that I think about it, it would be pretty funny if we're this universe's cheela [1], a freakishly overclocked biosphere that runs faster not because it had to but because it happened to.
It's perfectly possible that mitochondria are the dinosaurs of "cell powerplants" that just haven't encountered the asteroid to let other (ultimately better) solutions develop.
True, it's an anaerobic ersatz cnidarian [1] that may be an escaped cancer [2].
wow. we could be surrounded by so many extraordinary organisms and not even know it because there's so much variety just in our own backyards
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/1-458-bac...
>It is the first eukaryotic genus to be found to completely lack mitochondria, and all hallmark proteins responsible for mitochondrial function. The genus also lacks any other mitochondria related organelles (MROs) such as hydrogenosomes or mitosomes. Data suggests that the absence of mitochondria is not an ancestral feature, but rather due to secondary loss.
There are independent mitochondrial relative. They are mostly parasites that live inside cells.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrion
> The proto-mitochondrion was probably closely related to Rickettsia.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickettsia
> Being obligate intracellular bacteria, rickettsias depend on entry, growth, and replication within the cytoplasm of living eukaryotic host cells (typically endothelial cells).
> Most notably, Rickettsia species are the pathogens responsible for typhus, rickettsialpox, boutonneuse fever, African tick-bite fever, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Flinders Island spotted fever, and Queensland tick typhus (Australian tick typhus).
DNA isn't just abstract information, it's also where the first step of protein / enzyme construction occurs. DNA location matters.
This presumes that their energy budget was massive to begin with, rather than being selected for over time.
SFI Complexity podcast has a few great episodes on this
Everything exist by " accident", and that means that is the result of random events that happen unexpectedly in unimaginable places, leading to an environent were the outcome of this events causes more random events.
Why universe insist in making life so uncommon if it has the secret to create and replicate?