Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Ottawa Team Finds Spriz, the Pillar That Shapes Our Cells' Powerpacks

Every cell in your body runs on rooms you will never see. Inside each mitochondrion – the tiny powerpack that supplies most of a cell’s energy – two membranes sit one inside the other, separated by a gap so narrow it is measured in billionths of a metre. That gap, the intermembrane space, helps sustain the chemistry of energy production. For years, biologists knew the space mattered. What they did not know was whether a cell could actually set its size. A University of Ottawa team has now shown that it can, and named the part that does the job. The protein is called Spriz, and it works like a pillar holding up a ceiling.

The study, published in Science Advances in October 2026, was led by Dr. Luca Pellegrini, a full professor in the Faculty of Medicine’s Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology and Immunology. Its first author is Raman Shulinski, a graduate student in Pellegrini’s lab. Two undergraduates, Roman Loban and Victoria Caminiti, helped carry the work forward – a point Pellegrini makes with obvious pride. Young scientists at the start of their careers played a central role in a discovery with implications across cell biology.

A pillar, not a zipper

Spriz is short for Spatial Regulator of the mitochondrial Intermembrane Zone, and it is also known by its gene name, CCDC127. The team showed that it bridges the outer and inner mitochondrial membranes at once, forming a rigid tether that holds the two a set distance apart. That is the surprise. Most membrane tethers do the opposite job – they pull membranes close enough together to exchange materials, like a zipper closing. Spriz uses the same basic trick of connection to hold membranes apart instead, like a spacer bar keeping a room at a fixed height.

The proof came from putting the system under pressure. Altering Spriz in laboratory experiments substantially changed the size of the intermembrane space. In mice, removing the gene changed the spacing while leaving the mitochondria’s overall structure intact, and the mice remained viable – a clean result that let the team separate a targeted change in the gap from general damage to the powerpack. Then they went further. By engineering a longer version of the pillar, the researchers pushed the membranes farther apart on purpose and measured what changed. A customisable part, in other words. Cells do not just endure the dimensions of this space. They specify them.

Why does a few nanometres matter? Because the gap is a corridor. When the team widened it, molecules gained greater access to the space, and the mitochondria’s uptake of calcium – a key signal – changed with it. A change of only a few nanometres in the height of that room is enough to slow the calcium that must cross it, Pellegrini notes. Small room, big consequences. It is the same lesson nature keeps teaching at every scale, whether in a cell or in the ocean work behind bleached coral recovering after brief contact with healthy coral – structure shapes what can move, meet and thrive.

Five hundred million years of good design

The team found the same pillar architecture in humans and in every other vertebrate species they examined. Their evolutionary analysis dates the arrival of Spriz to roughly 500 million years ago, around the origin of vertebrates, and found it absent from plants, fungi and invertebrates such as sponges, worms and insects. As animals grew more varied – bigger bodies, specialised tissues, shifting food supplies – their cells needed finer control over energy. Spriz may have been one of evolution’s answers: a way to tune the powerpack’s internal layout to the job each cell performs.

To find all this, the Ottawa group combined computer simulations of molecular movement, genetics, large-scale protein analysis and advanced imaging, including three-dimensional electron tomography. Colleagues across the Faculty of Medicine joined in – Drs. Mary-Ellen Harper, Eric Lee, Morgan Fullerton and Yan Burelle – along with two prominent American collaborators, mitochondrial biologist Dr. Gyorgy Hajnoczky and evolutionary biologist Dr. Eugene Koonin. Pellegrini is plain about what their involvement signals. Scientists of that standing chose to join because the questions this discovery opens are big ones.

What a tunable powerpack could mean

The practical promise sits in medicine. The discovery opens a new path to understanding conditions in which mitochondria fail to meet a cell’s energy needs, or in which damaged powerpacks are not properly maintained and cleared away, as happens in Parkinson’s disease. Nobody is claiming a treatment today. What researchers now hold is a handle they did not have before – a single protein whose length and presence set a dimension that controls access and signalling inside the cell’s engine room. Handles like that are how long research roads start.

There is more room to work in, literally. Pellegrini’s lab is slated to move into the university’s Advanced Medical Research Centre when it opens in 2027 – the biggest investment in uOttawa history, with 350,000 square feet of advanced research space and a dozen core facilities found nowhere else in the region. A team that just redrew the map of the mitochondrion will soon have a new building in which to explore it.

Science at this scale rewards patience and rewards it publicly, much like the long exposures behind sixteen galaxies glowing in Chandra X-ray portraits or the steady engineering in driverless rides beginning at Las Vegas airport. Different fields, same habit: measure the thing nobody thought to measure, and the picture sharpens.

The takeaway for the rest of us

You do not need a biochemistry degree to take something from this story. It is a reminder that health is built at levels far below anything we can feel, by parts with names most of us will learn this week for the first time. It is also, frankly, a lovely Canadian lab story – a professor, a graduate student as first author, two undergraduates doing real work, and a result solid enough to publish in Science Advances and old enough, in evolutionary terms, to predate trees. Spriz has been holding our cells’ ceilings up for half a billion years. Ottawa just found it. That is a good week’s work by any measure.

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