Scientists have found a clue to why one type of dna is passed down to children by their mothers — but not their fathers Scientists have long wondered why animals get the dna inside their mitochondria, the cell’s energy center, only from their mothers New research explains why and offers hope for treating mitochondrial disorders. Mitochondrial dna (mtdna) is inherited maternally across animals, yet the evolutionary rationale behind this unusual mode of inheritance remains a longstanding mystery We inherit mitochondria from our mothers because sperm mitochondria are actively destroyed during fertilization in 99.9% of cases Except for some fungi and mussels, most eukaryotes inherit their mtdna from a single parent, most commonly a mother
The uniparental mtdna inheritance pattern evolved repeatedly, and a multitude of mechanisms have developed to exclude the paternal (sperm) mitochondria from a zygote 7. Now a team from the university of colorado boulder say they've found a clue that could explain our strange lack of dad genes
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