Inhibition of mitophagy drives macrophage activation and antibacterial defense during sepsis.

Mitochondria have emerged as key actors of innate and adaptive immunity. Mitophagy has a pivotal role in cell homeostasis, but its contribution to macrophage functions and host defense remains to be delineated. Here, we showed that lipopolysaccharide (LPS) in combination with IFN-γ inhibited PINK1-dependent mitophagy in macrophages through a STAT1-dependent activation of the inflammatory caspases 1 and 11.

The presence of tandem repeats and the initiation of replication in rabbit mitochondrial DNA.

The non-coding region of rabbit mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) exhibits two sets of tandem repeats between conserved sequence block 1 (CSB1) and the tRNA Phe gene. Both repeated sequences, short repeated (SR) and long repeats (LR), which contain 20 and 153 nucleotides, respectively, are involved in the generation of a high degree of mitochondrial heteroplasmy. Due to the location of these sequences in the regulatory region and their properties in terms of variable conformations, they could affect the initiation of replication of the heavy-strand DNA (H-strand DNA) and subsequently would influence the efficiency of mtDNA replication.

The branching order of mammals: phylogenetic trees inferred from nuclear and mitochondrial molecular data.

In order to clarify some controversial phylogenies such as those regarding the triplet of human, rodent, and cow and the evolutionary position of Lagomorpha with respect to other mammals, we have analyzed both nuclear and mitochondrial genes using the stationary Markov model developed in our laboratory. We found that the two sets of genes give different results. In particular the mitochondrial tree showed rabbit linked first to rodents and the rabbit-rodents branch linked to artiodactyls with human as the outgroup.

Mitochondrial biogenesis in rabbit articular chondrocytes transferred to culture.

The effect of the switch to aerobic growth conditions was examined in rabbit articular chondrocytes transferred to culture. Spectroscopic analysis of the cytochromes of the respiratory chain shows that only cytochrome b is present in chondrocytes from cartilage, cytochromes c, c1, and a.a3 being undetectable as compared with the typical spectrum found in a primary cell culture on day 4.