NYC Gazette

Columbia University researchers have pioneered a new resource, MitoBrainMap, the first atlas of brain mitochondria that provides insights into the energy landscape of the brain. The study was led by Martin Picard, an associate professor of behavioral medicine in collaboration with Michel Thiebaut de Schotten from the University of Bordeaux.

Martin Picard expressed the study's significance, stating, “There’s an emerging notion that energy is really important to health, but we don’t have a way to look at bioenergetics across the entire human brain.” The study aims to understand how mitochondrial energy supply influences brain health and possible links to neurological and psychiatric conditions.

The work commenced by analyzing a frozen human brain sliced into 703 cubes, each 3x3x3mm. This allowed the researchers to determine mitochondrial density and energy transformation capacity, leading to the creation of an energy map of the brain.

Anna Monzel, a computational research scientist involved in the study, observed that, “These differences are remarkable since all mitochondria originate from the same ‘mother’ pool of mitochondria in the oocyte.” This highlights how mitochondria differ across brain regions, adapting to the bioenergetic demands of specific cell types.

The significance of these findings lies in the fact that newer brain regions contain more specialized mitochondria, essential for efficient energy production. This distinction corresponds with the higher energetic demands of these regions compared to older sections of the brain.

The researchers are pursuing further studies to validate and apply MitoMapping across different research and clinical settings. Eugene Mosharov, the study's first author and research scientist at Columbia's Department of Psychiatry, remarked on future possibilities: “If validated, our model could be used to estimate the functional properties of mitochondria in the live brain using standard MRI scans.”

Martin Picard emphasized the importance of energy in biomedicine, suggesting new research directions: “Energy is the missing dimension of biomedicine. If you think of health as energy, it inspires you to ask different questions.”

The study, showcasing the first comprehensive mapping of brain mitochondria energy distribution, was published on March 26 in Nature. The full list of contributors includes both Columbia University and UCLA researchers. The project received support from several institutions, including the NIH, Baszucki Brain Research Fund, and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program.