Mitochondria are a silly place to store genes. They are often glibly called the powerhouses of the cell, but the parallel is quite exact. Mitochondrial membranes generate an electric charge, operating across a few millionths of a millimetre, with the same voltage as a bolt of lightning, a thousand times more powerful than domestic writing. To store genes here is like depositing the most precious books of the British Library in a dodgy nuclear power station.
— Nick Lane, in his discussion of the evolution of cellular complexity, page 109, in Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution, a book now studied in CC106: Biodiversity
