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The energy generators inside our cells reach a sizzling 50°C

Would be interesting to see patients mitochondria tested in this way.
Our body temperature might not ever get much hotter than 37°C. But it turns out that the insides of our cells can reach a scorching 50°C.

Our cells effectively burn food in oxygen to produce energy. Unlike a fire, this is a controlled process involving several steps, but it still generates a lot of heat.

But because respiration, as this process is known, happens inside tiny structures inside cells called mitochondria, measuring just how hot they get has not been possible. However, in the past year or so, several research teams around the world have developed dyes that fluoresce in different ways as temperatures change.

Pierre Rustin of INSERM in France and colleagues have now used a dye developed by a group in Singapore to measure the temperature inside the mitochondria of human kidney and skin cells kept at 38°C. They found that mitochondria operate at temperatures at least 6 to 10°C higher than the rest of the cell.
https://www.newscientist.com/articl...rators-inside-our-cells-reach-a-sizzling-50c/
 

ZeroGravitas

Senior Member
Messages
141
Location
UK
Would be interesting to see patients mitochondria tested in this way.
Absolutely, although it would pressumably be prohibitively difficult, given that we've only just had the first ever lab measurements (and the tempurature resolution of the dyes is either over 6°C or 10°C).

Pressumbly our mitochondria are running cooler (if their energy production is at a steady level, rather than pulsed or something), given the "Elevated Energy Production" finding [1,2] - when CFS cells were taken out of patient serrum. The assumption is that the generation capacity is there, structurally, but under-used.

Naviaux has written quite a bit about the thermodynamics of mitochondria already, right? (Seem to remember, when background reading.) Anything particually pertinent (or confirmed/contradicted) there?

It's kind of reassuring, encouraging, to see such a big change in understanding here; that science is honing in on the function of this cellular organells that we've been pointing at for a while, finding that we really didn't know them at all well, considering their (increasingly recognised) importance.
 
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Deltrus

Senior Member
Messages
271
I doubt our mitochondria are running cold because they are the source of the heat in our body. If they were cold then we would be cold.


Make me wonder however, how hot do they get during fever?
 

Forbin

Senior Member
Messages
966
Yep, I agree with @Deepwater , I notice the cold far more than other people I know. Is that down to my mitochondria, I have no idea, but it seems to me, at the very least, a potentially interesting test to run on patients.

This kind of reminds me of something I noticed a few months prior to the post-infectious onset of ME.

For many years, I'd been getting together with friends across town at least a couple of times a month. I'd generally leave fairly late, like at 1:00 AM. It was usually cold outside at that hour, but it never bothered me. In the months prior to coming down with ME, however, when I got in my car I would become wracked with odd chills for several minutes. It was so consistent, and the chills were so "violent," that I wondered what the hell was going on. This odd sensitivity to cold continued right up until the onset of ME.

I don't know if this had anything to do with ME, my metabolism or mitochondria. If it did, though, it suggests some process that precedes infectious onset, with the infection being more of a tipping point than a sole "trigger."