Transmission Electron Microscopy for Analysis of Mitochondria in Mouse Skeletal Muscle.

Skeletal muscle is the most abundant tissue in the human body and regulates a variety of functions including locomotion and whole-body metabolism. Skeletal muscle has a plethora of mitochondria, the organelles that are essential for aerobic generation of ATP which provides the chemical energy to fuel vital functions such as contraction. The number of mitochondria in skeletal muscle and their function decline with normal aging and in various neuromuscular diseases and in catabolic conditions such as cancer, starvation, denervation, and immobilization.

Synaptic organization of thalamocortical axon collaterals in the perigeniculate nucleus and dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus.

We examined the synaptic targets of large non-gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA)-ergic profiles that contain round vesicles and dark mitochondria (RLD profiles) in the perigeniculate nucleus (PGN) and the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus (dLGN). RLD profiles can provisionally be identified as the collaterals of thalamocortical axons, because their ultrastrucure is distinct from all other previously described dLGN inputs. We also found that RLD profiles are larger than cholinergic terminals and contain the type 2 vesicular glutamate transporter.

Relative distribution of synapses in the pulvinar nucleus of the cat: implications regarding the "driver/modulator" theory of thalamic function.

To provide a quantitative comparison of the synaptic organization of "first-order" and "higher-order" thalamic nuclei, we followed bias-corrected sampling methods identical to a previous study of the cat dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus (dLGN; Van Horn et al. [2000] J. Comp.