Mapping the Powerhouse: From Human Disease to Evolutionary Origins - Charting the Mitochondrial Proteome Across the Tree of Life

Allan C. Wilson Memorial Lecture

Mitochondria are central to cellular energy metabolism and arose through a singular endosymbiotic event ~2 billion years ago. Human mitochondria retain a vestige of their bacterial ancestry - a compact mtDNA encoding just 13 proteins - while the remaining ~1,100 proteins are nuclear-encoded and imported. Both genomes operate in concert to ensure normal physiology, and defects in either can underlie human disease.

In Lecture II, I will widen our lens to explore mitochondrial diversity across the eukaryotic tree of life. I will present integrated experimental and computational strategies to map the mitochondrial proteomes of highly diverged eukaryotes. Using these data, we reconstruct the lineage-specific gain-and-loss events that shape extant mitochondria and infer the ancestral mitoproteome of the Last Eukaryotic Common Ancestor (LECA). We envision this work laying the foundation for an emerging field of comparative mitochondrial biology.

Speaker: Vamsi Mootha, Harvard Medical School