'Turbocharged' Mitochondria Power Birds' Epic Migratory Journeys

Coulson, who was a graduate student with Staples and Guglielmo at the time, led a study on the yellow-rumped warbler, a songbird that migrates between Canada, where it nests, and its wintering grounds in the United States, Mexico and the Caribbean. First, during the birds’ fall migration, they captured the southbound songbirds and brought them into the lab. There, they managed the birds’ exposure to light and darkness to create two laboratory groups of “migratory” and “nonmigratory” warblers. Then they looked for differences in the birds’ mitochondria. The researchers removed the birds’ flight muscles (which required euthanizing them) and separated out the mitochondria. Then they did lab tests to measure the organelles’ oxygen consumption, which serves as a proxy for how much ATP mitochondria can produce to contract those muscles. Is the performance of the mitochondria different in birds that are migratory, compared to those that are not? “We hypothesize that when birds are migratin ... Read full article.