Garth Nicolson explains how to measure mitochondrial function in blood cells using a fluorescent dye that glows brighter when mitochondria are working harder. The intensity of the fluorescence shows whether someone is normal, aging, or chronically ill.
How do you measure mitochondrial function in human subjects? And what's the readout? I think that would be an interesting thing to share with our listeners. In terms of this clinical study, I found it very fascinating the way that you actually assessed the before and after effects on mitochondrial function.
Well, one of the ways to do this is to actually measure the ability of mitochondria to produce high energy reducing molecules in the cell. And we can take cells, for example, from blood of patients, blood of even normal people, and show that their blood cells have the capacity to do this to various degrees. And in people that are aged or people that are sick, or people that have a chronic illness of various types lose the ability to produce these high energy reductive molecules. And by putting in a fluorescent dye of a particular redox potential so that it will accept electrons, but only if they're high energy electrons produced by the inner mitochondrial membrane, we can actually show that the mitochondria will fluoresce if we feed this dye to the cells, if they can produce the high energy molecules. If they can't, they'll fluoresce to a lesser degree or not at all if they've completely lost function. So we can actually get a quantitative measurement of mitochondrial function this way.
