Marsh-Armstrong's Reports in PNAS regarding the transcellular degradation of axonal mitochondria
The Marsh-Armstrong lab reports in the July issue of PNAS the suprising discovery that in a location called the optic nerve head, large numbers of mitochondria are shed from neurons to be degraded by the lysosomes of adjoining glial cells. This finding calls into question the assumption that a cell necessarily degrades its own organelles.
Transcellular degradation of axonal mitochondria PNAS 2014 111 (26) 9633-9638.
This work was also the subject of a Perspective in Science:
Burdett TC, Freeman MR. (2014) Astrocytes eyeball axonal mitochondria. 345:385-6.