Researchers at U.Va.’s School of Medicine have created a method to illuminate and understand mitochondria in living creatures like never before. Under the microscope, they glow like streetlights, forming tidy rows that follow the striations of muscle tissue. They are mitochondria – the powerhouses of cells – and researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have created a method to illuminate and understand them in living creatures like never before. Not only can the researchers make the mitochondria glow for the microscope, but they also can discern from that fluorescence the mitochondria’s age, their health, even their stress level. And ultimately that glow, in its soft reds and greens, will shed light on human health and a massive array of illnesses, from diabetes to Parkinson’s disease to cancer. “Mitochondrial health is important for physiology and disease. That is well-known,” said researcher Zhen Yan of U.Va.’s Cardiovascular Research Center. “However, the whole field of mitochondrial health is largely unexplored, in large part because of the lack of useful tools. This has hindered the understanding of the importance of mitochondria in disease development. “With this study we have, for the first time, shown that we can use a reporter gene
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