A closer look
When your cellular power plants decide to go on strike, they leave a very specific crime scene behind. Mitochondrial myopathy is a devastating genetic disorder where the mitochondria fail to produce ATP, your body's energy currency. To diagnose it, doctors take a muscle biopsy and hit it with a specialized Gomori trichrome stain. Under a microscope, they look for "ragged red fibers"—horrifying mutant muscle cells that have desperately overproduced defective, bloated mitochondria in a failed attempt to generate energy, turning the tissue edge a jagged, diseased crimson.
