We seek a systems level understanding of intracellular organization in yeast. Therefore we are pursuing collaborations to actively combine our research on mitochondria with similar quantitative work on other organelles. The long-term goal is to generate and experimentally test models that integrate an increasing number of subcellular structures (organelles, cytoskeleton, etc).

We have recently embarked on a study of how mitochondrial form and function decline in aging cells. For this we apply our quantitative approaches to analyzing the efficiency of mitochondrial quality control through fission and fusion dynamics during aging in budding yeast cells.

To more directly apply our research approach to the cellular basis of disease, we are adapting the Mitograph method to mitochondria in mammalian cells and developing similar image processing methods for other organelles.

Our current research on the control of mitochondrial network morphology focus on cases where the overall tubular structure of the network is maintained. However mitochondria can also exhibit severe and very obvious morphologies that abolish the tubular structure. At the extreme, mitochondria lose the integrity of their multi-membrane organization and take on grossly aberrant shapes, becoming swollen or generating onion like internal membrane structures. New light microscopy techniques hold great promise to study the interplay between local internal membrane organizaton (the cristae) and tubular networks as a whole. We will continue to develop new imaging and image analysis methods to quantify and study mitochondrial morphology beyond the tubular network structure.