Neuronal Metabolism

Advances in technology for measuring cell metabolism has transformed the landscape for assessing cellular bioenergetics in health and disease in recent years. Cellular metabolic profiling uses extracellular flux (XF) analysis to measure cellular bioenergetics in real-time. In recent years, this direct and sensitive approach has demonstrated the importance of mitochondrial respiration for sustaining the high energy demands required by neuronal cells. Unlike many other cell types, neuronal cells lack the metabolic plasticity to switch between glycolysis and mitochondrial respiration to sustain energetic demands making them highly dependant on mitochondrial respiratory metabolism. XF analysis is improving our understanding of neuronal cell metabolism and helping to identify and expose metabolic phenotypes that associate with mitochondrial dysfunction in many neurodegenerative diseases. Mitochondrial respiration and oxidative phosphorylation are thus serving as sensitive indicators in diseases including, alzheimer’s, parkinson’s, huntingdon’s, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and neuroinflammatory disease. As well as being sensitive indicators for neurotoxicity and disease model validation, real-time metabolic profiling provides insight into processes and intermediates critical to cellular homeostasis and potential drug targets for neurodegenerative disease.

Combining years of technical know-how in XF analysis with cellular bioenergetics expertise, we offer fee-for service assays to measure real-time kinetic functional behaviours of live cells, providing our clients with a complete picture of cellular processes as they happen.