Objective: UPlanSApo 100x oil/1.40	Exposure: 500 ms
Microscope: Olympus DSU/IX81	Gain: 3
Camera: Hamamatsu ImagEM	Interval: 2 s

Mitochondria are rod-shaped organelles that can be considered the power generators of the cell, converting oxygen and nutrients into adenosine triphosphate (ATP). ATP is the chemical energy "currency" of the cell that powers the cell's metabolic activities. This process is called aerobic respiration and is the reason animals breathe oxygen. Without mitochondria (singular, mitochondrion), higher animals would likely not exist because their cells would only be able to obtain energy from anaerobic respiration (in the absence of oxygen), a process much less efficient than aerobic respiration. In fact, mitochondria enable cells to produce 15 times more ATP than they could otherwise, and complex animals, like humans, need large amounts of energy in order to survive. The digital video above displays normal fibroblast lung cells (FoLu line) from the Gray fox expressing monomeric green fluorescent protein (mEGFP) that has been fused to the mitochondrial targeting signal from subunit VIII of human cytochrome C oxidase.