A few reports have appeared concerning the synthesis of plastid lipids. Stumpf and James (17) and Stumpf et al. (18) found that both saturated and unsaturated fatty acids may be formed from acetate by chloroplast preparations. However, in some bluegreen algae, Bloch et al. (4) found that long-chain monounsaturates are synthesized by oxidative desaturation of corresponding saturates. Kates (9) s...

Eleven published articles (4 reviews, 7 research papers) are collected in the Special Issue entitled “Organelle Genetics Plants.” This selection of papers covers a wide range topics related to chloroplasts and plant mitochondria research: (i) organellar gene expression (OGE) and, more specifically, chloroplast RNA editing soybean, editing, intron splicing soybean during nodulation, as well stud...

Plant genetic engineering via the nucleus is a mature technology that has been used very productively for research and commercial biotechnology. By contrast, the ability to introduce foreign genes at specific locations on a chloroplast's chromosome has been acquired relatively recently. Certain limitations of nuclear genome transformation methods might be overcome by the site-specific introduct...

Individual plastids of vascular plants have generally been considered to be discrete autonomous entities that do not directly communicate with each other. However, in transgenic plants in which the plastid stroma was labeled with green fluorescent protein (GFP), thin tubular projections emanated from individual plastids and sometimes connected to other plastids. Flow of GFP between interconnect...

Plastid stromules are membrane-bound protrusions of the plastid envelope that contain soluble stroma. Stromules are often found connecting plastids within a cell and fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP) experiments have demonstrated that green fluorescent protein (GFP) can move between plastids via these connections. In this report, the ability of endogenous plastid proteins to tra...

Here we report the characterization of the Chlamydomonas reinhardtii gene ARG9, encoding the plastid resident N-acetyl ornithine aminotransferase, which is involved in arginine synthesis. Integration of an engineered ARG9 cassette in the plastid chromosome of the nuclear arg9 mutant restores arginine prototrophy. This suggests that ARG9 could be used as a new selectable marker for plastid trans...

BACKGROUND In conventional approaches to plastid and mitochondrial genome sequencing, the sequencing steps are performed separately; thus, plastid DNA (ptDNA) and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) should be prepared independently. However, it is difficult to extract pure ptDNA and mtDNA from plant tissue. Following the development of high-throughput sequencing technology, many researchers have attempte...

The discovery of a nonphotosynthetic plastid in malaria and other apicomplexan parasites has sparked a contentious debate about its evolutionary origin. Molecular data have led to conflicting conclusions supporting either its green algal origin or red algal origin, perhaps in common with the plastid of related dinoflagellates. This distinction is critical to our understanding of apicomplexan ev...

The dinoflagellates have repeatedly replaced their ancestral peridinin-plastid by plastids derived from a variety of algal lineages ranging from green algae to diatoms. Here, we have characterized the genome of a dinoflagellate plastid of tertiary origin in order to understand the evolutionary processes that have shaped the organelle since it was acquired as a symbiont cell. To address this, th...