3 ms·

mitachondria are living organelles, they could simply be induced to replicate until the desired quantity is reached.

• tomjen3 8y ago
  If I recall bio from school, they are super adapted to living in animal cells -- they probably couldn't survive on their own.
  • aldoushuxley001 8y ago
    It's true that they very much rely on a nuclear genome, because some of their genes required for independent replciation have been lost. But surely there's a framework that enables the mass replication of mitochondria using our own cells as a source material. I doubt blood would work because red blood cells contain effectively very minimal, if not zero, mitochondria (depending on stage of cycle). Funny enough, the best bet might be taking mitochondria from sperm or egg. Human sperm have ~50-75 mitochondria per cell. There's on average 50 million sperm cells per ml of ejaculant and the average is 2.5ml per ejaculation, so 125 million mitochondria could potentially be harvested from an average guy in a single go, provided the extraction is an unrealistic 100% efficiency.
    • bjelkeman-again 8y ago
      50 million/ml x 2.5 ml x 50 = 6.25 billion, is what I get the number to be.
      • aldoushuxley001 8y ago
        Ah yes, I totally botched the math. Thanks for that. So 6.25 billion potentially harvestable mitochondria per average sperm donation. Hard to say how much might be needed for a rejuvination test, but those seem like viable numbers.