IDENTIFICATION OF MITOCHONDRIAL DEFICIENCY USING PRINCIPAL COMPONENT ANALYSIS

The mitochondrial pathologies are a heterogeneous group of metabolic d isorders that are characterized by anomalies of oxidative phosphorylat ion, especially in the respiratory chain. The diagnosis of these patho logies involves many investigations among which biochemical study is a t present the main tool. However. the analysis of the results obtained during such study remains complex and often does not make it possible to conclude clearly if a patient is affected or not by a biochemical and/or bioenergetic deficiency. This arises from two main problems: 1. The determination of control values from the whole set of variable va lues (affected and unaffected people). 2. The small size of the popula tion studied and the large number of variables collected which present a rather large variability. To cope with these problems, the principa l component analysis method is applied to the results obtained during our biochemical studies. This analysis makes it possible for each resp iratory chain complex, to distinguish clearly two subsets of the whole population (affected and unaffected people) as well as to detect the variables which are the most discriminative.