Objective: UPlanSApo 100x oil/1.40	Exposure: 400 ms
Microscope: Olympus DSU/IX81	Gain: 3
Camera: Hamamatsu ImagEM	Interval: 2 s

In most animal species, mitochondria appear to be primarily inherited through the maternal lineage, though some recent evidence suggests that in rare instances mitochondria may also be inherited via a paternal route. Typically, a sperm carries mitochondria in its tail as an energy source for its long journey to the egg. When the sperm attaches to the egg during fertilization, the tail falls off. Consequently, the only mitochondria the new organism usually gets are from the egg its mother provided. Therefore, unlike nuclear DNA, mitochondrial DNA doesn't get shuffled every generation, so it is presumed to change at a slower rate, which is useful for the study of human evolution. Mitochondrial DNA is also used in forensic science as a tool for identifying corpses or body parts, and has been implicated in a number of genetic diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease and diabetes. 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.