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Comment by vintermann | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't sound like getting them into every cell in the body would be easy. If delivering a package with genes into every cell in the body was easy, viruses would be happy, figuratively speaking.

I just mapped mine, for what it's worth. A bit odd to have the whole 16000-something base pairs stored on my computer.

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We already have mitoviruses, it stands to reason they they might adapt to infect mitochondria that are being delivered to cells.

We haven't found any mitoviruses in animals, yet, at least?

1: https://virology.ws/2019/03/28/viruses-that-infect-mitochond...

We have viruses in animals that reproduce using the mitochondria already, but don’t exclusively target the mitochondria. I believed these were categorized as mitoviruses but I was mistaken.

How did you get that (and what guarantees on data privacy?)

I’d be very interested

I used family tree dna. Not really much in the way of guarantees on data privacy as you'd expect (at least not from a software developer's perspective), but I figure it's challenging enough to abuse knowledge of my exact mitochondrial haplogroup, that if someone can do that, they can do worse anyway.

>Doesn't sound like getting them into every cell would be easy

>Viruses would be happy

As a programmer, I sometimes wondered at the value proposition of certain antiviral drugs, especially the ones that interfere with replication.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiviral_drug#Reverse_transcr...

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