Could Mitochondrial transplantation into Cardiomyocytes be an effective treatment for cardiac disease? This paper shows the first test of transplanting non-autologous mitochondria from healthy skeletal muscle cells into normal cardiomyocytes. This transplant led to short term improvement of bioenergetics in the short term however the improved effects disappear over time. This could lead to a powerful treatment for acute cardio stress such as heart attacks. It is unclear as of yet if the loss is to a paring down of the amount of mitochondria in the cell to maintain normal levels or  if the transplanted mitochondria are cleared. As mitochondrial stasis is a normal cell function,  the next question is whether cells with underperforming mitochondria could use the transplanted mitochondria to gain back normal function.

This paper offers a very nice Metabolism study protocol for looking at time-lapse microscopy of fluorescence, Nanolive imaging (https://www.nanolive.com/products/3d-microscopes/cx/) and confocal microscopy in combination with bioenergetic data from the Seahorse by Agilent.

The image in the article was acquired with Nanolive 3D Cell Explorer-fluo and features Mitochondria from a rat’s skeletal muscle cell (shown in red) transplanted into cardiomyocytes.

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