One of the first population-scale studies on how common genetic traits are influenced by variations in the DNA of mitochondria, the powerhouses of human cells, has been completed by scientists at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the University of Cambridge, EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), and their collaborators. The team identified associations between mtDNA variants and an amino acid, N-formylmethionine (fMet), and effects of fMet on the risk of developing a range of common, late-onset illnesses.