Mitochondrial marker protein?

[Tom Anderson]

On Wed, 20 Jun 2007, WS wrote:

> any ideas for a good mitochondrial marker protein for human skeletal
> muscle which is easily to detect in westerns? a molecular weight above
> 25kd would be fine.

Prohibitin is a popular choice for this.

A colleague is working on the growth and replication of mitochondria, and
he's spent a lot of time thinking about how to quantify them. A
fundamental problem here is that the protein composition of mitochondria
changes according to signals and growth conditions, which means it's not
clear what 'amount' means - if you have the same amount of F0 ATPase but
twice as much of some matix enzyme, say SDH, do you have the same amount
of mitochondrion, or twice as much? Does it matter if some given mass of
proteins is divided between N mitochondria or 2N? I think he decided that
the gold standard was the number of copies of the mtDNA, but this is a
nightmare to measure; for most of his work, he's stained with MitoTracker
and measured the total volume of mitochondria in the cell. I'll ask him if
he has any suggestions about markers for blots, though.

You might also like to have a look at:

http://www.antibodybeyond.com/reviews/organelle-markers/mitochondria-marker.htm

tom

-- 
Tom Anderson, MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology, UCL, London WC1E 6BT
(t) +44 (20) 76797264   (f) +44 (20) 76797805   (e) thomas.anderson from ucl.ac.uk