Plastid retrograde signaling (chloroplast to nucleus) has been proposed to play an important role in the acclimation of plant function to environmental stress. Although several pathways and molecular components, as well as some signals, have been identified in recent years, our understanding of the communication between plastid and nucleus under stress remains fragmentary. This mini-review summ...

Endosomal Sorting Complex Required for Transport (ESCRT)-III proteins mediate membrane remodeling and the release of endosomal intraluminal vesicles into multivesicular bodies. Here, we show that the ESCRT-III subunit paralogs CHARGED MULTIVESICULAR BODY PROTEIN1 (CHMP1A) and CHMP1B are required for autophagic degradation of plastid proteins in Arabidopsis thaliana. Similar to autophagy mutants...

Colpodellids are free-living, predatory flagellates, but their close relationship to photosynthetic chromerids and plastid-bearing apicomplexan parasites suggests they were ancestrally photosynthetic. Colpodellids may therefore retain a cryptic plastid, or they may have lost their plastids entirely, like the apicomplexan Cryptosporidium. To find out, we generated transcriptomic data from Voromo...

Fagaceae is one of the largest and economically important taxa within Fagales. Considering the incongruence among inferences from plastid and nuclear genes in the previous Fagaceae phylogeny studies, we assess the performance of plastid phylogenomics in this complex family. We sequenced and assembled four complete plastid genomes (Fagus engleriana, Quercus spinosa, Quercus aquifolioides, and Qu...

The plastid genome is highly conserved among plant species, suggesting that alterations of its structure would have dramatic impacts on plant fitness. Nevertheless, little is known about the direct consequences of plastid genome instability. Recently, it was reported that the plastid Whirly proteins WHY1 and WHY3 and a specialized type-I polymerase, POLIB, act as safeguards against plastid geno...

Selective autophagy has been extensively studied in various organisms, but knowledge regarding its functions in plants, particularly in organelle turnover, is limited. We have recently discovered ATG8-INTERACTING PROTEIN1 (ATI1) from Arabidopsis thaliana and showed that following carbon starvation it is localized on endoplasmic reticulum (ER)-associated bodies that are subsequently transported ...

RNA editing in higher plant plastids changes single cytidine residues to uridine through an unknown mechanism. In order to investigate the relation of editing to physiological processes and to other steps in plastid gene expression, we have tested the sensitivity of chloroplast RNA editing to heat shock and antibiotics. We show that heat shock conditions as well as treatment of plants with prok...

Plastids are DNA-containing organelles and can have unique differentiation states depending on age, tissue, and environment. Plastid biogenesis is optimized by bidirectional communication between plastids and the nucleus. Import of nuclear-encoded proteins into plastids serves as anterograde signals and vice versa, plastids themselves send retrograde signals to the nucleus, thereby controlling ...

Cryptophytes are an ecologically important group of largely photosynthetic unicellular eukaryotes. This lineage is of great interest to evolutionary biologists because their plastids are of red algal secondary endosymbiotic origin and the host cell retains four different genomes (host nuclear, mitochondrial, plastid, and red algal nucleomorph). Here, we report a comparative analysis of plastid ...