Inside every tumor cell, a tiny power plant is quietly keeping score

Every cell carries mitochondria — little power plants with their own loop of DNA — and Riddhiman Dhar's team at IIT Kharagpur has spotted something new hiding there. Across many cancer types, they found that tumor cells carrying more copies of this mitochondrial DNA also carry more mutations — a hint that the tiny loop could one day help doctors read how aggressive a cancer is. Extra copies also switched on genes tied to how tumors answer chemotherapy. It is early days, but it opens a new path: reading a tumor's power plants to fine-tune the fight. The work was published in The FEBS Journal.