Unprecedented Mitochondrial Protein Atlas Reveals 8,619 Proteins Across the Eukaryotic Tree

That does not mean 43% of the proteins themselves were newly discovered, or that every unknown protein has an immediate medical use. The figure refers to protein families absent from the Pfam catalog, and the work is a collection of studies rather than a single experiment.

Possible drug targets and an evolutionary puzzle

The atlas includes 33 protein families found across eukaryotic pathogens but absent in humans. Project leader Vamsi Mootha described such proteins as potentially useful drug targets because a treatment might act on a parasite without hitting a human counterpart. Nature noted that this could inform research on illnesses including malaria and sleeping sickness, but the papers do not establish a treatment, its safety or its effectiveness.

The project also used an artificial intelligence model to examine the known genomes of 203 eukaryotes and predict which proteins were mitochondrial. That comparison identified 1,420 families missing from current datasets.

Those predictions may help researchers study when mitochondria emerged in eukaryotic evolution. Scientists broadly agree that mitochondria descend from bacteria that entered an ancestral cell roughly two billion years ago, but debate continues over whether that happened early or late in the evolution of complex cells. The new atlas adds evidence to that discussion without settling it.