Figure 3.

The time course of mitochondrial fragmentation after glutamate stimulation. (A) Maximal projection confocal images of primary cortical neurons transfected with mito-AcGFP1. Neurons were treated without or with 30 μM glutamate together with 3 μM glycine for 3, 6 and 24 h, respectively. The lower panels are the high resolution images of the boxed region in upper panels. The images at different time points were acquired from different neurons; (B–C) Frequency distribution and cumulative curves of mitochondrial length and area under different conditions. The values of histogram intervals (bins) are 0.25 μm for mitochondrial length and 0.5 μm² for mitochondrial area. Distribution data showed that glutamate treatment caused significant increase in the number of shorter and smaller mitochondria and this effect was dependent on treatment time; (D) The summary of average mitochondrial length, area and density for each condition. Data are shown as mean ± SE; ** p < 0.01, ANOVA test. Data were collected from 10–11 neurons grown on two glass coverslip per experimental condition and a total of 1169 mitochondria were measured.