Mitochondrial morphology

Mitochondria are capable of perceiving internal and external cellular alterations, while responding to stress or special needs via adaptive changes, thereby making them excellent organelles for assessing the health status of cells. As the shape of mitochondria directly reflects their functionality, it is particularly interesting to analyse the architecture and dynamics of mitochondrial networks to assess the beneficial activity of target constituents. Two industrial partnerships have thus been set up with SILAB and CLARIANT, two companies serving the cosmetics industry. This has given rise to a CIFRE thesis and the creation of two quantitative imaging software packages for confocal videomicroscopy data analysis. Mitochondrial morphology studies can also highlight harmful effects (predictive and environmental toxicology) or help identify new biomarkers (of pathological conditions). As these organelles emerged before the evolutionary radiation of eukaryotes, our tools can also generate information on the mitochondrial diversity between taxonomic groups, in connection with the metabolism of species and their developmental or immune processes. The MITOMATIQUE project is accredited by the MUSE I-SITE Biomarkers & Therapy key initiative (KIM) and the CNRS prematurity programme.