ABSTRACT
In eukaryotic cells, mitochondria play the fundamental role of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) production during the process of oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS). However, these cytosolic organelles also have several other important physiological functions, including sugar and fatty acid catabolism, amino acid metabolism, buering of the cytosolic calcium concentration (Rizzuto et al., 2012), regulation and execution of dierent types of cell death (Galluzzi et al., 2012) and arrangement of adaptive responses to perturbations of intracellular homeostasis (Liesa and Shirihai, 2013). Furthermore, mitochondria are able to discharge a range of intracellular signals including reactive oxygen species (ROS), mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and specic proteins, thus operating as fundamental hubs of a wide array of signalling pathways (Galluzzi et al., 2012).
