Figure 7.

Morphologic alterations in mitochondria in response to smoke and elastin immunization. Summary of alterations in mitochondrial features obtained from EM images described in Figure 4. (A) Mitochondrial area (area of RPE cells occupied by mitochondria) was determined from electron micrographs, indicative of mitochondrial swelling and biogenesis. (B) Mitochondrial position was determined from electron micrographs by determining their centroid coordinates as a percentage of the corresponding RPE length and thickness, respectively. Each centroid was subsequently assigned to one of four bins (basal, apical, basolateral, and central). Based on our previous publication demonstrating that mitochondria exhibit an apical shift from the basal to central compartment in response to smoke, only the central bin is depicted here, demonstrating a smoke and immunization dependent shift of mitochondria. (C) Mitochondria shape was assessed in ImageJ, binning shapes from 0 to 1 into 10 bins, with 1 being a perfect circle. The normalized total mitochondrial distribution across the 10 bins demonstrates a shift to more oblong mitochondria in control elastin and oxidized elastin-immunized mice. Data are expressed as mean ± SEM (n = ∼450 mitochondria per condition).