Many of your relatives probably have an answer to the question of whether you are more your mother’s or your father’s child. But the correct answer to the question is not as simple as it might seem.
Genetically, you actually carry more of your mother’s genes than your father’s. That’s because of little organelles that live within your cells, the mitochondria, which you only receive from your mother.
Mitochondria are the energy-producing factories of the cell; without them, a cell would not be able to generate energy from food.
Mitochondria have an interesting history, as about 1.5 billion to 2 billion years ago they were free-living organisms. The ancestor of all mitochondria was a bacterium that was engulfed by another bacterium, but for one reason or another not digested, giving rise to the eukaryotes. The eukaryotes are basically all plants, animals, and fungi, plus some rather weird organisms grouped together under Protista.
Because of their evolutionary history as free-living bacteria, mitochondria have retained their own genome, called mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA. Each cell contains many copies of mtDNA, as mitochondria freely replicate within the cell.
The Mother Effect
