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Molecular evolution

A hydrogen-producing mitochondrion

Nature volume 396, pages 517–519 (1998)Cite this article

Dark, damp (and sometimes smelly) places harbour some of nature's most curious eukaryotes. The likes of swamps and intestines are swarming with mostly single-celled eukaryotes (protists) that, like all cells, must produce ATP to survive. Yet these places lack enough oxygen to sustain ATP synthesis as it occurs in textbook mitochondria like our own. Some protists possess no mitochondria, surviving from anaerobic fermentation in the cytosol. Others have quite odd mitochondria that harbour anaerobic ATP-producing pathways. On page 527 of this issue, Akhmanova et al.1 report a gem of such an odd mitochondrion in the ciliate protist Nyctotherus ovalis.

The ciliate lives in the suffocatingly oxygen-poor confines of cockroach intestines, where it helps the insect to digest cellulose. Instead of consuming oxygen, Nyctotherus's mitochondrion has the bizarre property of excreting hydrogen as a by-product of ATP synthesis. Similar hydrogen-generating organelles — hydrogenosomes — have been studied in anaerobic eukaryotes for 25 years2. Hydrogenosomes have often been suspected of stemming from the same endosymbiotic bacterium that gave rise to mitochondria. But now, Akhmanova et al. report a hydrogenosome that has its own genome, directly betraying its endosymbiotic past.

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Figure 1: Summary of ATP-producing organelles across a very limited, and arbitrarily chosen, spectrum of eukaryotic taxa.
Figure 2

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Department of Zoology, Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London, SW7 5BD, UK

    T. Martin Embley

  2. the Institut für Genetik der TU, Spielmannstrasse 7, Braunschweig, D-38023, Germany

    William Martin

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  1. T. Martin Embley
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  2. William Martin
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Embley, T., Martin, W. A hydrogen-producing mitochondrion. Nature 396, 517–519 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/24994

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