Fred and Ginger Never Had This Problem

Nearly every eukaryote has at least two separate genomes — one in the central nucleus and one in the mitochondria — and when those two genomes act like a pair of "mismatched" partners, the "dance" they do falls apart and the results can be "disastrous," Not Exactly Rocket Science's Ed Yong says. The mitochondrial genome and the nuclear genome, though they evolved in different ways, must work together within the cell. Yong says that according to a paper recently published in BioEssays, "some of the most fundamental aspects of eukaryotic life are driven by the need to keep these two genomes dancing in time," and that many species evolve the way they do because of this pressure to make this "mitonuclear" match.