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Cell Health Maintenance
Tracking Down the Brain’s Power Requirements
By Joshua Hill Saturday, May 3, 2008The brain has been, more often than not, a source of quandary for scientists. The sheer level of sophistication is, pardon the ironic pun, mind boggling. And naturally, a lot of energy needs to go towards powering this major organ of ours; 20% of the body’s energy use to be exact.
For a long time, most scientists have assumed that the majority of the energy used to power the brain went towards fueling electrical impulses that neurons use to communicate with one another.
However, thanks to new research to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, scientists have discovered that this is not the entire picture. Turns out that while two thirds of the brain’s energy goes towards helping the neurons send their signals, the remaining third is used for cell-health maintenance.
Co-author Wei Chen describes this remaining third as housekeeping. A radiologist at the University of Minnesota Medical School, Chen and his colleagues used a magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) to measure the brain’s energy production in rats. They focused their search on the rate of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) production; ATP being the primary source of cellular energy.
MRS uses a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to focus in on the three phosphorus atoms within each ATP molecule. What they found was that ATP levels seemed to vary with brain activity. For example, when lab rats were knocked out, they produced 50% fewer ATP molecules than when they were only mildly anesthetized.
According to Chen, most of the ATP produced hen the brain is inactive, goes towards cell maintenance. Conversely, when animals are more alert, additional ATP goes towards fueling other of the brain’s functions.
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