This (arguably unhelpful) phrase seems to be taught across schools all over the world. What are some other phrases like this that are common ?
Okay, as a biologist it really upsets me how that phrase is written off. I did an impromptu half hour lecture for my wife about how significant “the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell” is,
The mitochondria is what ties everything on this planet together, it’s the one thing that ties all life together, it is the exact same mechanism in plants as it is in animals, it takes the same ingredients and does the same function, and comes from the same origin.
There is no chain in our DNA that codes for the mitochondria, it exists outside of our DNA, it has no relationship with our DNA, it only fuels reading DNA and it’s decoding and replication, but it isn’t included in our genetics. It replicates itself, it exists as a separate entity, and it acts as the functioning unit for all energy within the cell.
It would be like if when a child was born their lungs were provided by an outside source and had the same genetic material as everyone else’s lungs. Oh and puppy lungs, and crab lungs, and avocado lungs, and grass lungs, every single living thing on this plant has the same lung genetic material. And it has no clue that it serves this function, all it knows is ADP goes in, ATP goes out, and ATP is energy that fuels all function of all life.
And it comes from the friggin mitochondria.
Please be impressed with that little hitch hiker, it is the powerhouse that powers your neurons, grows the vegetables you eat, and makes life happen on earth.
How will we know something extraterrestrial comes our way? They’ll have their own mitochondria, because something needs to power their cells, and it won’t be the same as ours.
Writing off the mitochondria from biology is like writing off the exchange of goods in economics, or doing physics without the concept of mass, or art without feeling. There is nothing more basic, more fundamentally important to biology than the existence of the mitochondria, and it’s role as the powerhouse of the cell.
MITOCHONDRIA IS THE POWERHOUSE OF THE CELL. That you know that makes me happy.
Thank you! I couldn’t stand to hear this anti mitochondria slander.
This is prokaryote erasure.
Alien civilisation: Wait, you’re telling me everyone here has a parasite that’s within their own cells that is so well established that you can’t live without it?
Human: Yeah, pretty much everything alive has it. Nbd.
Not a parasite. A vital sidekick whom we cannot exist without.
A parasite, you say?
How will we know something extraterrestrial comes our way? They’ll have their own mitochondria, because something needs to power their cells, and it won’t be the same as ours.
New writing prompt, aliens show up and they are wildly different from us but they and all life on their planet also use the exact same mitochondria as us.
The phrase became unhelpful when it wat teached at very young age without any context…
Did your lecture get you laid?
Are you kidding, I’m married.
I’m genuinely curious, how do you feel about parasite eve?
It’s one of my all time favourite games.
Never played it, is it an RPG or f/tps? Is it available on steam?
Sadly it’s a PS1 exclusive game, but the story is super interesting a it revolves around mitochondria.
It’s sort of a mixture of resident evil and final fantasy. Worth checking out on an emulator though!
it only fuels reading DNA and it’s decoding and replication
and its* decoding and replication
Thanks! I’m no etymologist, I had to Google which was bugs and which was words.
wait, we do inherit mitochondria through our mothers, and we can sequence it to find different maternal haplogroups.
Though it exists in parallel to our DNA, it does encode a lot about us and our genetics.
I think you’re missing the point of why that phrase became a bit of a joke and is considered unhelpful. It’s not written off because people think mitochondria are unimportant or should be written off, it’s because when you’re a teen learning this stuff and they’re trying to explain how cells work, mitochondria are a particularly strange and complicated thing that’s thrown in to the mix, and it sounds important and complicated but in lieu of any real details there’s the sudden brick wall of this weirdly uncharacteristic phrase that doesn’t really sound like how you’re teacher normally speaks, doesn’t really read like how the rest of the textbook reads and other than some vague allusion to “power” fails quite spectacularly to tell you what mitochondria are.
Part of what made it maddeningly confusing was that these lessons are getting you thinking about how mechanisms can coalesce to form larger systems, encouraging you interrogate macro scale phenomena down to the smallest scales and see how it all ticks and then suddenly they hit you with this magic “powerhouse”, very poorly explained, and which because of that poor explanation appears somehow irreducibe. You know mitochondria have “power” of some sort but any of their own mechanisms are conspicuously left out of the picture. This is probably for good reason because of the difficulty of making a syllabus that isn’t too deep or broad for the time available and for teenagers to pick up but it’s a very sudden brick wall. HOW do the mitochondria power cells? Do the mitochondria have cells? Do the mitochondria’s cells have mitochondria? How are they transmitting this power to our cells? The way this phrase was used was more reminiscent of a slogan, or an ad campaign and quite unlike much of anything else one remembers from biology class, it felt very… out of context. Even the choice of the word “power house” always felt weird, as it wasn’t for me at least, a word commonly encountered so to use it as an analogy really undermined it’s ability to help you grasp anything as it sought to explain one concept in terms of another only vaguely understood concept. I gathered this was a similar term to “power plant” although other than a popular museum in Sydney I had never heard the term used outside of that goofy phrase and to say mitochondria function similar to a power plant, in that they produce power doesn’t really say much more than, “mitochondria are the energy source of cells” which is similarly meaningless in all but the most basic sense.
So, don’t blame the mocking meme for dismissing mitochondria, blame the weird ass phrase the meme mocks for completely failing to explain anything about them and relegating them to a single, cryptic, hand waving sentence.
Knowing ‘the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell’ means absolutely nothing sans any context. It should make you sad that people’s knowledge of your field is as shallow as a puddle. (Kidding mostly. Also projecting)
Physics can be done without mass. Next question
that phrase is to biology as “donde esta la biblioteca” is to spanish
‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’
Or when sounding like “A” as in neighbor and weigh
And on weekends and holidays, and all throughout May
And you always be wrong, no matter what you say.
yes, Bryan, we all call that “desk”
*diesk
I always thought this one was pretty… WEIRD…
Except in glacier, because English is fucked.
Mitochondria is plural. Mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell.
What’s the singular, then?
Mitochondrion
This one ^
Mitochondrium
The correct phrase is “The Mitochondria…” OP left off the “the”
I believe most nations have a version of “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” that is taught in early education.
I haven’t heard about mitochondria in so many years (obviously. why would I?) and I can’t explain why it feels so good reading this now.
I just started replaying Parasite Eve for the first time since 98, so this was an amusing post for me also.
The book is on the table.
Question and all comments (apart from “donde esta la biblioteka”) are not “all over the world”, but American
Stop, drop, and roll
