Active thermodynamic force driven mitochondrial alignment

Mitochondria are critical organelles in eukaryotes that produce the energy currency ATP. In nerve axons, mitochondria are known to align at almost regular intervals to maintain a constant ATP concentration, but little is known about the mechanism. In this letter, we show theoretically that ATP production and ATP-dependent non-directional movement of mitochondria are sufficient for alignment, even in the absence of an explicit repulsive force between them. This is similar to thermodynamic forces driven by thermal fluctuations, even generated by non-equilibrium processes, and demonstrates the diversity of mechanisms governing the motion of biological matter.

• Publication year

  2023

• Venue

  Physical Review Research

• Publication date

  2023-05-09

• Fields of study

  Biology, Physics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1103/physrevresearch.6.l022024arXiv 2305.05553
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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