Mitochondria contain their own genome, a small circular molecule of around 16.5 kbases. The mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) encodes for only 13 polypeptides, but its integrity is essential for mitochondrial function, as all 13 proteins are regulatory subunits of the oxidative phosphorylation complexes. Nonetheless, the mtDNA is physically associated with the inner mitochondrial membrane, where the majority of the cellular reactive oxygen species are generated. In fact, the mitochondrial DNA accumulates high levels of oxidized lesions, which have been associated with several pathological and degenerative processes. The cellular responses to nuclear DNA damage have been extensively studied, but so far little is known about the functional outcome and cellular responses to mtDNA damage. In this review we will discuss the mechanisms that lead to damage accumulation and the in vitro models we are establishing to dissect the cellular responses to oxidative damage in the mtDNA and to sort out the differential cellular consequences of accumulation of damage in each cellular genome, the nuclear and the mitochondrial genome.

The goal of our study was to evaluate the quality of fit from different types of probability distributions for continuous data. For this, performance traits and quality of quail egg in the production of nutraceutical eggs were used as a continuous data source. The data were collected over 42 days, the experimental design was completely randomized with 7 treatments, 6 repetitions, with 252 animals allocated in 36 cages. The distributions for continuous data used were the exponential, gamma, gaussian, and lognormal. The R Open Source and SAS® University Edition software was used to perform the analysis. The graphical analysis of the traits was performed from the predicted versus observed values, Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF), and skewness-kurtosis. The fits were also evaluated by the Akaike information criterion (AIC), Bayesian information criterion (BIC), Conditional model of adjusted R-Square (), Conditional model of adjusted concordance correlation (), Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (KS), Cramer-von Mises test (CvM), Anderson-Darling test (AD), Watanabe-Akaike Information Criterion (WAIC) and Leave-one-out cross-validation (LOO). All the tests indicated the Gaussian distribution as the most suitable and they excluded the exponential distribution for all the evaluated characteristics.