Introduction
Isolation of intact mitochondria from human and animal tissue is crucial for studies that focus on the elucidation of their function and dysfunction in conditions such as aging, diabetes and cancer. As potential drug targets, high quality functional mitochondrial isolates are important for drug screening studies [1]. Mitochondria isolation from solid tissue is usually carried out using labor-intensive homogenizer-based methods [2] that require extensive operator experience. Here we describe a semi-automated method to release mitochondria from solid rat brain tissue, using a PBI Shredder and PCT in place of traditional manual homogenization.