Chapter 18: Mitochondrial Base Excision Repair

Mitochondria are found in cells from almost all eukaryotic organisms, and even those who lack them show evidence of having had these organelles at some point in their evolutionary history, suggesting a pivotal role for mitochondria in the creation of the eukaryotic cell (Martin et al., 2015). Although mitochondria are mostly known for their role in energy metabolism, they participate in several biological processes as important and diverse as intracellular calcium (Finkel et al., 2015) and iron (Lill et al., 2012) metabolism, cellular fate after stress (Green et al., 2014) and viral infection (Jacobs and Coyne, 2013), making their functional integrity essential for cellular and organismal homeostasis.