Mitochondria play important roles in diverse cellular processes such as energy production, cellular metabolism, and apoptosis to promote cell death. To investigate mitochondria-associated biological processes such as structure, dynamics, morphological change, metabolism, and mitophagy, there exists a continuous demand for visualizing and monitoring techniques elucidating mitochondrial biology and disease-relevancy. Due to the advantages of high sensitivity and practicality, fluorescence phenomena have been most widely used as scientific techniques for the visualization of biological phenomena and systems. In this review, we briefly overview the different types of fluorescent materials such as chemical probes, peptide-or protein-based probes, and nanomaterials for monitoring mitochondrial biology.
Funding: This research was funded by the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) international program, E30963, and was also supported in part by the Creative Materials Discovery Program through the National Research Foundation (2019M3D1A1078941), and a National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korean government (MSIT) (NRF-2020R1C1C1010044, NRF-2019R1A6A1A11051471).
