A Human Brain Map of Mitochondrial Respiratory Capacity and Diversity.
Eugene V MosharovAyelet M RosenbergAnna S MonzelCorey A OstoLinsey StilesGorazd B RosoklijaAndrew J DworkSnehal BindraYa ZhangMasashi FujitaMadeline B MarianiMihran BakalianDavid L SulzerPhilip Lawrence De JagerVilas MenonOrian S ShirihaiJ John MannMark UnderwoodMaura BoldriniMichel Thiebaut de SchottenMartin PicardPublished in: Research square (2024)
Mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation (OxPhos) powers brain activity 1,2 , and mitochondrial defects are linked to neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders 3,4 , underscoring the need to define the brain's molecular energetic landscape 5-10 . To bridge the cognitive neuroscience and cell biology scale gap, we developed a physical voxelization approach to partition a frozen human coronal hemisphere section into 703 voxels comparable to neuroimaging resolution (3×3×3 mm). In each cortical and subcortical brain voxel, we profiled mitochondrial phenotypes including OxPhos enzyme activities, mitochondrial DNA and volume density, and mitochondria-specific respiratory capacity. We show that the human brain contains a diversity of mitochondrial phenotypes driven by both topology and cell types. Compared to white matter, grey matter contains >50% more mitochondria. We show that the more abundant grey matter mitochondria also are biochemically optimized for energy transformation, particularly among recently evolved cortical brain regions. Scaling these data to the whole brain, we created a backward linear regression model integrating several neuroimaging modalities 11 , thereby generating a brain-wide map of mitochondrial distribution and specialization that predicts mitochondrial characteristics in an independent brain region of the same donor brain. This new approach and the resulting MitoBrainMap of mitochondrial phenotypes provide a foundation for exploring the molecular energetic landscape that enables normal brain functions, relating it to neuroimaging data, and defining the subcellular basis for regionalized brain processes relevant to neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders.
Keyphrases
- white matter
- oxidative stress
- resting state
- multiple sclerosis
- mitochondrial dna
- cerebral ischemia
- single cell
- stem cells
- mesenchymal stem cells
- copy number
- gene expression
- genome wide
- single molecule
- bone marrow
- electronic health record
- reactive oxygen species
- blood brain barrier
- cell therapy
- deep learning
- protein kinase
- subarachnoid hemorrhage