Abstract
Current methodologies used for mitochondrial motility analysis tend to either overlook individual mitochondrial tracks or analyze only peripheral mitochondria instead of mitochondria in all regions of the cell. Furthermore, motility analysis of an individual mitochondrion is usually quantified by establishing an arbitrary threshold for "directed" motion. In this work, we created a custom, publicly available computational algorithm based on a previously published approach (Giedt et al., 2012. Ann Biomed Eng 40:1903-1916) in order to characterize the distribution of mitochondrial movements at the whole-cell level, while still preserving information about single mitochondria. Our technique is easy to use, robust, and computationally inexpensive. Images are first pre-processed for increased resolution, and then individual mitochondria are tracked based on object connectivity in space and time. When our method is applied to microscopy fields encompassing entire cells, we reveal that the mitochondrial net distances in fibroblasts follow a lognormal distribution within a given cell or group of cells. The ability to model whole-cell mitochondrial motility as a lognormal distribution provides a new quantitative paradigm for comparing mitochondrial motility in naïve and treated cells. We further demonstrate that microtubule and microfilament depolymerization shift the lognormal distribution in directions which indicate decreased and increased mitochondrial movement, respectively. These findings advance earlier work on neuronal axons (Morris and Hollenbeck, 1993. J Cell Sci 104:917-927) by relating them to a different cell type, applying them on a global scale, and automating measurement of mitochondrial motility in general.