The power plants of life, mapped across the tree of life

A team spanning the Broad Institute, Harvard, Mass General and Boston University has published the most comprehensive catalog yet of mitochondrial proteins — across humans, plants, and parasites like Leishmania and Trypanosoma, whose mitochondrial proteomes run 50% larger than ours. More than half the proteins have unknown functions, and the whole dataset is free at mitocarta.org. "One step in the larger scientific effort to use the existing diversity on Earth" to learn how complex life evolved, says the team. Published in Cell.