UCLA Mitochondrial Metabolism and Bioenergetics Laboratory

Welcome to the Mitochondrial Metabolism and Bioenergetics Laboratory! Our group studies how energy metabolism and metabolic flexibility – the ability to switch between sugar, amino acid, and fatty acid oxidation in response to biological cues – can control cell function and fate. Ultimately, we aim to discover novel regulatory points of metabolism and develop mitochondrial proteins and pathways as therapeutic drug targets.

Research

Mitochondrial remodeling during macrophage activation

How metabolic flexibility can control cell physiology

Assay development and experimental guides

Recent Publications

Boone C, Judge S, Shami A, Danna B, Ball AB, Waingankar TP, Saqub H, Divakaruni AS, Lewis SC. (2025) Saturated lipid stress attenuates mitochondrial genome synthesis in human cells. bioRxiv [Preprint]. doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.07.28.667051. 40766347

Mekkittikul M, Zhu C, Danna BT, Xiaohong Z, Rios A, Yang K, Villanueva M, Agarwal D, Castro D, Gu X, Strofs AR, Shirihai OS, Stiles L, Frautschy SA, Oscarsson J, Esterline RL, Cole GM, and Divakaruni AS. (2025) ¹³C tracing in synaptosomes reveals that SGLT2 inhibition with dapagliflozin prevents metabolic deficits in the 5X-FAD model of Alzheimer’s Disease. bioRxiv [Preprint]. 2025.04.30.651373. 40654760

Ball AB, Jones AE, Nguyễn KB, Rios A, Marx N, Hsieh WY, Yang K, Desousa BR, Kim KKO, Veliova M, Del Mundo ZM, Shirihai OS, Benincá C, Stiles L, Bensinger SJ, and Divakaruni AS. (2025) Pro-inflammatory macrophage activation does not require inhibition of oxidative phosphorylation. EMBO Reports. 26(4):982-1002. 39753784

Lab News

Welcome Summer 2025 Trainees!

July, 2025

We want to extend a big welcome to Steven Moreton who will be joining us for the summer from Morehouse School of Medicine. Steven is a fifth year PhD student and will be applying some techniques from our lab to his studies on brown adipocytes.

Welcome to our newest lab member!

September, 2024

We want to extend a big welcome to our newest lab member Alex Kratochwill! Alex is a rising 2nd-year PhD student in the Molecular, Cellular, and Integrative Physiology department at UCLA. We are so excited to see all Alex will accomplish in lab!

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