Researchers Name 33 Possible Drug Targets Inside Parasite Mitochondria

The MitoCarta Tree of Life Consortium has compared the proteins found inside mitochondria, the compartments that supply most of a cell's energy, in eight organisms drawn from across the tree of life. In a paper published on Oct. 1, 2026, the group reports 8,619 distinct mitochondrial proteins, grouped into 3,199 families of related proteins.

The paper reports 33 of those families as conserved in disease-causing eukaryotes, organisms whose cells have a nucleus, yet absent in humans, and calls them promising candidate targets for protozoan infectious diseases, which single-celled parasites cause. They are presented as candidates for drug development rather than as a tested treatment.

To reach organisms the project had not measured in the laboratory, the consortium retrained a classifier built on a protein language model, an AI system trained on protein sequences, and used it to predict the mitochondrial proteins of about 200 eukaryotes.

The authors trace the origin of mitochondria to the moment a bacterium took up residence inside an archaeal host cell about 2 billion years ago. From the expanded set they reconstruct the mitochondrial proteins of the last common ancestor of all eukaryotes, the lineage that gave rise to animals, plants and fungi, and report that it already carried a complex mitochondrion able to work with or without oxygen.

The predicted set also runs in the other direction: some lineages expanded particular protein families, while in others the set of mitochondrial proteins shrank so far that the paper describes them as apparently heading toward complete loss of the organelle.