The ability to physically partition the human brain at a spatial resolution comparable to neuroimaging methods enabled the development of a brain-wide atlas of mitochondrial content, specialization and enzymatic oxidation and phosphorylation activities.

We show that the human brain contains diverse mitochondrial phenotypes driven by both topology and cell types. Compared with white matter, grey matter contains >50% more mitochondria. Moreover, the mitochondria in grey matter are biochemically optimized for energy transformation, particularly among recently evolved cortical brain regions. Scaling these data to the whole brain, we created a backwards linear regression model that integrates several neuroimaging modalities11 to generate a brain-wide map of mitochondrial distribution and specialization.