Cristae Clear

When colour TV first arrived, it added a whole new depth to the viewing experience, revealing details previously hidden in shades of grey. A similar revolution of colour is bringing new insights to niche areas of microscopy. The latest addition is a dye that brings colours to the imaging of mitochondria – the energy-generating powerhouse of human cells – in living cells. Structures within the mitochondria can then be labelled in order to highlight how their shape and behaviour changes over time. In this example, cristae – the densely folded inner membranes that provide a large surface area for energy production – are green while DNA are pink. Observing the mitochondria over time, the team saw that even as the shape and layout changed, closely-packed cristae acted as barriers to compartmentalise different sections and lock the DNA in voids between them. Understanding these dynamics could help explain mitochondria’s role in development and disease.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

Website

• Image from work by Tianyan Liu and Till Stephan, and colleagues
• College of Future Technology, Institute of Molecular Medicine, National Biomedical Imaging Center, Beijing Key Laboratory of Cardiometabolic Molecular Medicine, Peking University, Beijing, China
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), December 2022