Fri 22nd August 2014

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.

Davis  CH, Kim KY, Bushong EA, Mills EA, Boassa D, Shi T, Kinebuchi M, Phan S, Zhou Y, Bihlmeyer NA, Nguyen JV, Jin Y, Ellisman MH, Marsh-Armstrong. 

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. 

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