Collaborative team awarded nearly £2 million for mitochondria project

Project lead Dr Andrew Wood, together with researchers from the universities of Glasgow, Dundee and Newcastle and Cancer Research Scotland Institute, received funding for the project ‘CONTROL-MITO: Chemical Genetic Toolkit for Controlling Mitochondrial Proteins’ which will run over three years. 

It is one of 19 projects in the Precision Mitochondria programme which were awarded a total of £66 million.

The project teams, known as R&D Creators, will take on a problem that has remained unsolved for approximately 50 years, building a reliable, shared toolkit for engineering the mitochondrial genome. 

Inside mitochondria, particular proteins decide whether delivering DNA, expressing it and maintaining it, succeed or fail. Rather than moving DNA themselves, the CONTROL-MITO team will build the tools to control those proteins. 

They will do this using chemical genetics: small molecules that switch a chosen protein on or off precisely, at adjustable doses, and reversibly, across a range of model systems. 

Building on fast-acting ‘tags’ they and others have already made to strip out selected proteins in the nucleus and cytoplasm, they will extend the approach into the mitochondrial interior, and add a way to bring chosen proteins together on demand inside mitochondria. 

In parallel, they will engineer cell lines built to respond to these chemical controls. 

The result is meant as a flexible, widely useful toolkit for temporarily tuning the cell's inner workings to favour making, propagating and transferring engineered mitochondria. 

The goal is for this to become a shared resource for teams across ARIA's Precision Mitochondria programme.