Chloroplasts are plant-specific organelles that perform photosynthesis and responsible for the world’s primary productivity. Using light energy, chloroplasts produce many important products, including starch, amino acids, lipids, pigments and various secondary products. Therefore, chloroplasts are essential to the lives of all plants and animals alike. Chloroplast transformation is a unique tec...

PREMISE OF THE STUDY We developed a bioinformatic strategy to recover and assemble a chloroplast genome using data derived from low-coverage 454 GS FLX/Roche whole-genome sequencing. METHODS A comparative genomics approach was applied to obtain the complete chloroplast genome from a weedy biotype of rice from Uruguay. We also applied appropriate filters to discriminate reads representing nove...

The isolation of chloroplast and nuclear DNA from dark- and light-grown, control- and 3-amino-1,2,4-triazole-treated wheat seedlings, Triticum vulgare, is described. Contrary to a previous report, we found that chloroplast and nuclear DNA had similar buoyant densities (1.702 grams per cubic centimeter) and that they could not be resolved by buoyant density centrifugation in CsCl. Difference in ...

The fine structure of the ac-20 strain of Chlamydomonas reinhardi is described . Cells grown mixotrophically in the presence of acetate have a highly disordered chloroplast membrane organization and usually lack pyrenoids. Chloroplast ribosome levels are only 5-10% of wild-type levels. Cells grown phototrophically without acetate possess more chloroplast ribosomes and have more normal membrane ...

Chloroplast gene expression is primarily controlled during the translation of plastid mRNAs into proteins, and genetic studies have identified cis-acting RNA elements and trans-acting protein factors required for chloroplast translation. Biochemical analysis has identified both general and specific mRNA-binding proteins as components of the regulation of chloroplast translation, and has reveale...

1. Chloroplast Inheritance 1.1. Early Cytological Observations of Chloroplast Inheritance 1.2. Chloroplast Inheritance in Isogamous Organisms 1.2.1. Unicellular Green Algae: Chlamydomonas reinhardtii 1.2.2. Discovery of Chloroplast DNA 1.2.3. Molecular Mechanism of Non-Mendelian Inheritance of cpDNA 1.2.4. Transformation of cpDNA 1.2.5. Active Digestion of mt– cpDNA Revealed in a Single Zygote ...

Chloroplast development requires coordinate nuclear and chloroplast gene expression. A putative signal from the chloroplast couples the transcription of certain nuclear genes encoding photosynthesis-related proteins with chloroplast function. We have identified at least three Arabidopsis nuclear genes (GUN1, GUN2, and GUN3) necessary for coupling the expression of some nuclear genes to the func...

PREMISE OF THE STUDY High-throughput sequencing of genomic DNA can recover complete chloroplast genome sequences, but the sequence data are usually dominated by sequences from nuclear/mitochondrial genomes. To overcome this deficiency, a simple enrichment method for chloroplast DNA from small amounts of plant tissue was tested for eight plant species including a gymnosperm and various angiosper...

The number of chloroplast DNA molecules in Euglena gracilis cells was measured by determining the shift in the observed second-order rate constant for the reassociation of (125)I-labeled chloroplast DNA in the presence of unlabeled total cell DNA. Cells grown to stationary phase in the dark contained 217 molecules of chloroplast DNA. Cells grown to stationary phase in the light in either hetero...

Although reverse genetics has been used to elucidate the function of numerous chloroplast proteins, the characterization of essential plastid genes and their role in chloroplast biogenesis and cell survival has not yet been achieved. Therefore, we developed a robust repressible chloroplast gene expression system in the unicellular alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii based mainly on a vitamin-repress...