Why and how paternal mitochondrial DNA gets cut out of the inheritance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is inherited maternally across animals, yet the evolutionary rationale behind this unusual mode of inheritance remains a longstanding mystery. Understanding the processes that prevent the transmission of paternal mtDNA and thus ensure maternal-only inheritance is crucial to uncovering the evolutionary significance of this widespread phenomenon. Historically, research has focused on mechanisms that act within eggs to destroy sperm mitochondria via autophagy and the ubiquitin-proteasome degradation system. However, recent discoveries across multiple animal species, including humans, reveal a surprising twist: paternal mtDNA is actively degraded within mitochondria independently of and prior to the complete breakdown of the organelle itself, often even prior to fertilization. Only a few studies have begun to illuminate the molecular machinery responsible for this early mtDNA elimination. In this review, we explore the emerging landscape of paternal mtDNA elimination mechanisms across species, highlighting newly discovered pathways, evolutionary implications, and open questions that are furthering our understanding of mitochondrial inheritance.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".