Isolation and characterization of chlamydomonas mutants deficient in the plastid ycf10 open reading frame

摘要

The complete DNA sequences of a dozen plastid genomes have been determined and they have revealed the existence of approximately 120 genes that can be divided in three major groups. The first group (approximately 50 genes) corresponds to sequences required for plastid transcription and translation. The second group (approximately 40 genes) codes for components of the photosynthetic apparatus. The last group contains many open reading frames of unknown function (for review, see). Some of these are species-specific and designated as ORFs. Those that are conserved in algae and in higher and lower plants have been designed ycf for "hypothetical chloroplast open reading frame". Chloroplast reverse genetics coupled with biophysical and biochemical analysis has become a powerful tool for analyzing the function of chloroplast-encoded proteins. Several of these ORFs of unknown function have been inactivated in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and tobacco by biolistic transformation (for review, see). This paper summarizes the characterization of a Chlamydomonas ycf10-deficient mutant. An unusual feature of this chloroplast gene is that it encodes a plastid envelope protein.