Mitochondria are essential to human and animal life, but analyzing their ever-changing configurations through a microscope is a challenge. As they continually fuse and fragment, they affect how cells, and therefore bodies, work.<\/p>\n
Studying the tube-shaped organelles that provide energy to cells has recently been made easier through the work of a Brock University graduate student.<\/p>\n
Andrew Valente, a student in the Department of Biological Sciences with an interest in computer coding, has developed a set of tools that researchers around the globe can freely access to better measure and understand the movements of mitochondrial networks.<\/p>\n
\u201cI use a lot of open source software,\u201d he says. \u201cI thought it would be a good idea to adopt open source code because then we can have everybody looking at it and verifying that it\u2019s working correctly.\u201d<\/p>\n
In an open source software arrangement, anyone can study, modify and distribute software for any purpose, which encourages widespread collaboration and free, public use.<\/p>\n
Valente, from Thorold, is studying the structure and movement of mitochondrial networks, and is developing methods to track them for his master\u2019s program.<\/p>\n
He remembers being struck by the fact that research on mitochondria had relied heavily on qualitative descriptions of how mitochondria appear.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need to measure the shape, length and size of mitochondria so that we can move away from subjective descriptions of what mitochondria look like,\u201d says Valente.<\/p>\n
He noticed the mitochondria he was studying \u201clooked a lot like roots,\u201d and recalled the time he examined a photograph of roots in ImageJ<\/a>, a scientific open source image processing program.<\/p>\n \u201cThe mitochondrial structures are somewhat similar to roots,\u201d he says. \u201cI thought that it would make sense to use a similar image-processing method to determine the lengths of the branches of mitochondria that make up the network.\u201d<\/p>\n He wrote computer code that built upon an existing piece of software.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s the\u00a0beauty of open source projects: you can quickly adapt what has already been done by others for your own needs.\u201d<\/p>\n The method was a success. Valente went on to write computer codes that would enable researchers to measure mitochondrial structures in three dimensions and over a period of time.<\/p>\n He posted his codes on an open-source software development platform called GitHub<\/a> so that they could be freely accessible to others, who would then be able to propose changes to improve the algorithm and code itself.<\/p>\n \u201cIt has allowed other researchers to easily provide semi-quantitative parameters to describe the mitochondrial structure,\u201d says Valente. \u201cThis makes it easier to be more objective.\u201d<\/p>\n