02/28/2026
This was my favorite paper EVER written on mitochodnria because it helped me understand the link between melanin and cristae alignment. For me, this solved the "C-value paradox" and the "Regulatory Conundrum" of human evolution.
The reason humans look, think, and operate so differently from chimps, despite sharing 98.8% of the same protein-coding genes, is not because we have different "parts." It is because we have a fundamentally different timing and energy distribution system. Cristae geometry is a fossil for how we did it using an ancient system. Melanin is a chiral chaotic polymer that absorbs all frequencies of light. It is capable of directly communicating with the IMJ sans the genetic metabolic machinery on the IMM.
The three divers who saved the EU from Chernobyl on May 4, 1986 are the HUMAN experiment buried in this paper. All three survived and never got radiation sickness. They did get radiation tans on their legs because of what they had to walk through to save Europe from the core melt down. Their survival meant that radiosynthesis has to have a way to lead to cristae alignment, even in humans.
The "radioactive tan" was the physical manifestation of the body rapidly deploying melanin to create a chiral, spin-selective shield. This allowed electrons to continue "tunneling" through the IMJ even as the delicate genetic machinery was being bombarded. Because this mechanism is driven by physics (CISS and semiconduction) rather than biology (transcription/translation), it is nearly instantaneous and incredibly "hardy."
It is the same reason we found out in the last decade that the Chernobyl fungi and arthropods grow faster in the fire, because they aren't fighting the radiation; they are "plugging into" it.
https://martinpicard.substack.com/p/discovering-how-mitochondria-communicate