When I heard about the Corona virus first time few months ago, I tried to understand what is a virus in the first place and how it differs from a bacteria? I soon realized I did not have foundational knowledge needed to understand this in detail, so began my attempt to make up for the knowledge deficit of microbiology. To understand the biochemical reactions and the building elements of a cell, I had to learn chemistry also in detail. I had to log on to Khan Academy for basic courses in Science and order new books to learn the concepts and fundamentals and also bring out the books already available in my book shelf to the reading table. This has kept me busy for the past few months. And I thought of sharing a new thing I learnt about - the concept of "Mitochondrial Eve". You can google the term and get better answers but I still would like to describe in my own terms.
We, human beings inherit the chromosomes from both of our parents, one pair each from father and mother. Though the genetic information comes from both of them, other cellular structural components (like the membrane structures, cytoplasm, mitochondria, lysosome etc.) comes only from mother. What is interesting is, one of the components - mitochondria has its own genetic structure and it only comes from mother. That makes it easier to track maternal ancestry. As you go backwards in the timescale, the number of mothers reduce and around 200,00 years ago, it stops at a single mother - biologists named her Mitochondrial Eve or the mother of humankind. That gives us a reference to study many other things. Like how much of biological features began transforming us from cave dwellers into present day human beings. Those things let us discuss in the future posts.
