Inside every cell's power plant is a tiny room — and scientists just found the protein that sets its height

Mitochondria, the power plants inside our cells, are built like a room inside a room, with a narrow gap between their two walls. Biologists assumed that gap was just leftover space. A University of Ottawa team led by Luca Pellegrini has found it is carefully set by a protein they named SPRIZ — a rigid pillar that holds the two walls a fixed distance apart, published in Science Advances. Change the pillar's length and the room widens or narrows, which changes how the power plant handles calcium, one of its key signals. The pillar appears in humans and every other vertebrate examined, dating back some 500 million years — and understanding it may shed light on diseases where mitochondria fail, such as Parkinson's.

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