Mitochondrial Medicine Conference
A mini-conference on mitochondrial medicine was held in Kaliningrad at the I. Kant BFU on January 30.
The results of the research were presented by prominent Russian and foreign scientists, including representatives of the University of Lausanne (Switzerland), the Endocrinological Research Center (Moscow), the Institute of Physics and Applied Mathematics of the Ural Federal University (Yekaterinburg).
Ilya Mazunin, PhD, Head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetic Technologies of the Institute of Living Systems, commented on the event to sobkor in Kaliningrad:
– It's worth starting with what mitochondria are. If we imagine the cell of our body as a workshop, then the mitochondria will be the room where they produce energy for the work of this workshop. Mitochondria have their own DNA, where instructions are written on how it should work to generate energy. With each cell division, the instruction is rewritten, and periodically it turns out that several words change in it. The errors that appear do not reflect the true essence, and the mitochondria cease to understand how they should work. Mitochondrial medicine is just studying those errors in the instructions or, in other words, mutations in the DNA of the mitochondria that lead to disturbances in energy production and disruption of the functioning of these cells. This, as a consequence, leads to the emergence of various diseases.
The class of mitochondrial diseases is very wide, but first of all it is neuromuscular and neurodegenerative. That is, the most energy-dependent tissues are affected: muscle and nerve. Mitochondrial medicine is a relatively new direction, the first mutations in mitochondrial DNA associated with clinical manifestations were discovered only in 1988. This year can be considered the beginning of the era of molecular mitochondrial medicine. Since then, hundreds of mutations have been discovered both in the mitochondrial genome and in nuclear genes encoding proteins imported into mitochondria. All these mutations lead to mitochondrial diseases, the clinical picture of which is very, very diverse.
Over the past 30 years, mitochondrial medicine has stepped far forward: now its focus is on the creation of gene therapy protocols and modifications of in vitro fertilization protocols. For example, a few months ago, the first child was born in Mexico, it was talked about in all the media, who had mitochondria from another woman, because his mother had them sick, and as we know, mitochondria are transmitted only through the female line. Of course, this topic has been debated for a long time, because usually a person has 2 parents, where part of the information is from a man and part from a woman, and here part of the information came from a second woman.
We decided to hold such a conference because as part of our, and mine in particular, scientific activities, we are developing protocols for editing the mitochondrial genome. In fact, these are protocols for gene therapy of mitochondrial diseases. But, of course, this is a narrow engineering field, and in general, mitochondrial diseases are the work of doctors, because this is a very complex clinical picture, doctors should see it. One of today's lectures will be devoted to the clinic of such diseases.
On the other hand, in order to interfere with the mitochondrial genome, we need to understand how it works, both in humans and in animals. This is the subject of a lecture by one of the world's experts in the field of evolutionary biology, who also deals with mitochondria. In addition, when mutations appear at the cellular level, the mitochondria themselves change, and then a clinic appears – this is a separate lecture on the structure of the mitochondria. In general, the four lectures announced at the conference give us a fairly complete picture of various aspects of mitochondrial medicine.
We hope that students will also be interested in this topic today. I already have people in my laboratory who think with me every day about the nuances of experiments on the development of protocols for the treatment of mitochondrial diseases. Some of the guys work closely with a professor from Switzerland, they hold conferences on Skype every week, conduct very serious projects.
The very topic of mitochondrial medicine, though narrow, but globally we raise common issues. These are genetics, mutagenesis, evolution, and pathomorphology. If this is gene therapy, then we are considering different approaches to DNA cloning. For students, it is also an understanding of how all the knowledge that is given to them is used in real life, because you need to know everything from fundamental things to applied ones.
Konstantin Popadin, PhD, University of Lausanne, Switzerland:
– Mitochondrial medicine is important because mitochondria live their own separate lives inside each of our cells, and this can lead to pathological consequences for the whole organism. For example, many cells of our body, and especially the most important ones: neurons and muscle cells, after dividing several times, do not divide further. However, mitochondria continue to divide inside the cell and compete with each other. In this intracellular competition, what matters is not how well mitochondria work, but how quickly they divide. Therefore, the winners are selfish mitochondria, which optimize only their rate of division, and not the production of energy for the cell. As a result, after several decades, the cell is filled with such selfish mitochondria and dies, causing aging and senile diseases (degradation of muscles and neurons).
Modern medicine can explain almost all serious diseases, usually caused by a single mutation. However, the next step is to understand how we can combine many different small breakdowns in order to further predict that this organism will be slightly more sick than the other.
Today I spoke about the need to understand not only the highly harmful mutations that make us sick, but also to try to understand the numerous weak breakdowns in our genome
I think this question is one of the most interesting among all those that biology studies today: what is the genetic component of the fact that someone is higher, someone has a better education, someone has more children. We could not raise these questions 10 years ago. And now we can look at the genome and say why this person has a higher probability that he will have a good education or he will run faster or he has a better chance of living to 100. Moreover, the answers to these questions are not simple dry statistics, this knowledge brings us closer to understanding how our genome works."
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31.01.2017