A STEREOLOGICAL UNFOLDING METHOD FOR THE STUDY OF THE MITOCHONDRIAL NETWORK

Abstract

When the mitochondrial network within the cell is in a fragmented state, it resembles a spatial distribution of prolate spheroids of various shapes, sizes and orientations. This paper presents a maximum-likelihood scheme for inferring the distribution of spheroidal shapes, sizes and orientations from the observed distribution of elliptical sections. We also present a parametric bootstrap suitable for inferring confidence intervals for the parameters describing the shape and size distribution of the spheroids.

Keywords

• bootstrap
• maximum likelihood
• mitochondria
• spheroid
• statistics
• unfolding problem