title: Rapid morphological characterization of isolated mitochondria using Brownian motion.
abstract: Mitochondrial morphology has been associated with numerous pathologies including cancer, diabetes, obesity and heart disease. However, the connection is poorly understood-in part due to the difficulty of characterizing the morphology. This impedes the use of morphology as a tool for disease detection/monitoring. Here, we use the Brownian motion of isolated mitochondria to characterize their size and shape in a high throughput fashion. By using treadmill exercise training, mitochondria from heart and gastrocnemius of Balb/c mice were modulated in size and used to investigate the protocol. Consistent with previous reports, the heart mitochondria of untrained mice increased 5% in diameter immediately after a single bout of moderate exercise (1.091 ± 0.004 μm) as compared to completely sedentary controls (1.040 ± 0.022 μm). In addition, no change was observed in the size of gastrocnemius mitochondria (1.025 ± 0.018 μm), which was also in agreement with previous studies. The method was also successfully applied to smallerSaccharomyces cerevisiaemitochondria.
authors.affiliation: Texas Center for Superconductivity, University of Houston, 202 Houston Science Center, Houston, TX, USA. ; Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, 40 Blossom St, Boston, MA, 02114, USA.
authors.forename: Akilan
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Palanisami
authors.affiliation: Texas Center for Superconductivity, University of Houston, 202 Houston Science Center, Houston, TX, USA.
authors.forename: Jie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Fang
authors.affiliation: Department of Health and Human Performance, University of Houston, 3855 Holman Street, Houston, TX, USA.
authors.forename: Thomas W
authors.initials: TW
authors.lastname: Lowder
authors.affiliation: Department of Health and Human Performance, University of Houston, 3855 Holman Street, Houston, TX, USA.
authors.forename: Hawley
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Kunz
authors.affiliation: Texas Center for Superconductivity, University of Houston, 202 Houston Science Center, Houston, TX, USA.
authors.forename: John H
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Miller