AndyPR
Senior Member
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Would be interesting to see patients mitochondria tested in this way.
https://www.newscientist.com/articl...rators-inside-our-cells-reach-a-sizzling-50c/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.