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The front cover picture shows chemical fragment‐based screening by a 2D protein‐detected nuclear magnetic resonance approach. A novel scoring metric, difference intensity analysis (gray, yellow, and blue bar plot), was developed to quantitate NMR spectral changes and discriminate between compounds according to whether they gave rise to hits, non‐hits, or nonspecific NMR crosspeak broadening due to aggregation. More information can be found in the full paper by R. B. Hill et al. on page 448 in Issue 5, 2018 of ChemBioChem (DOI: 10.1002/cbic.201700386).

“Methods for imaging mammalian mitochondrial morphology: A prospective on MitoGraph”

Harwig MC, Viana MP, Egner JM, et al. Analytical Biochemistry. 2018;552:81-99.

Mitochondria are dynamic organelles frequently undergoing fission and fusion events. These processes are known to be altered in disease scenarios (i.e. cancer, diabetes and various neurological diseases). Historically, examining mitochondrial morphology has been a subjective qualitative process, making it difficult to: 1) evaluate certain cell types, 2) uncover subtle phenotypes and 3) have reproducibility between labs. Using an image analysis platform (MitoGraph) initially built to measure yeast mitochondrial volume, we quantified many morphological features of mammalian mitochondria. MitoGraph analysis successfully distinguished highly fragmented from highly interconnected mitochondrial networks and supplied metrics to distinguish mitochondria from a variety of cell types.