Respiratory complexes and cardiolipins have exceptionally long lifetimes. The fact that they co-localize in mitochondrial cristae raises the questions of whether their longevities have a common cause and whether the longevity of OXPHOS proteins is dependent on cardiolipin. To address these questions, we developed a method to measure side-by-side the half-lives of proteins and lipids in wildtype Drosophila and cardiolipin deficient mutants. We fed adult flies with stable isotope-labeled precursors (CN-lysine or C-glucose) and determined the relative abundance of heavy isotopomers in protein and lipid species by mass spectrometry. To minimize confounding effects of tissue regeneration, we restricted our analysis to the thorax, the bulk of which consists of post-mitotic flight muscles. Analysis of 680 protein and 45 lipid species showed that the subunits of respiratory complexes I-V and the carriers for phosphate and ADP/ATP were among the longest-lived proteins (average half-life of 48±16 days) while the molecular species of cardiolipin were the longest-lived lipids (average half-life of 27±6 days). The remarkable longevity of these crista residents was not shared by all mitochondrial proteins, especially not by those residing in the matrix and the inner boundary membrane. Ablation of cardiolipin synthase, which causes replacement of cardiolipin by phosphatidylglycerol, and ablation of tafazzin, which causes partial replacement of cardiolipin by monolyso-cardiolipin, decreased the lifetimes of the respiratory complexes. Ablation of tafazzin also decreased the lifetimes of the remaining cardiolipin species. These data suggest that an important function of cardiolipin in mitochondria is to protect respiratory complexes from degradation.
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