How plant cells split their solar-powered chloroplasts in two
Lee J, Weerasooriya H, Chen C, Hu J
Plant Signaling
Every leaf in your garden owes its green color and food-making ability to chloroplasts that trace back to a billion-year-old partnership between a bacterium and a cell, and how well plants can multiply and manage these tiny factories affects how vigorously they grow and handle stress.
Chloroplasts, the parts of plant cells that capture sunlight and make food, were once free-living bacteria that got swallowed up and put to work by an ancestral cell. This review pulls together decades of research on the specific proteins that let these bacteria-turned-organelles multiply by splitting in two, showing that the process relies on a mashup of leftover bacterial parts and newer plant-made proteins working together. Some of the same division proteins also help other cell parts like mitochondria and peroxisomes multiply, hinting at shared rules of the road inside cells.
Key Findings
Plastid division relies on interdependent machinery including Min-system positioning proteins, the stromal FtsZ ring, envelope proteins ARC6, PARC6, and PDV, and cytosolic ARC5/DRP5B proteins.
Arabidopsis 'arc' (accumulation and replication of chloroplasts) mutants were foundational in identifying and dissecting the components of the plastid division apparatus.
Division machinery components have dual evolutionary origins, some inherited from the ancestral cyanobacterium and others contributed by the eukaryotic host cell, with some factors shared across plastid, mitochondrial, and peroxisomal division.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists have mapped out the molecular machinery plants use to split their chloroplasts, the sun-powered factories that make photosynthesis possible, revealing a hybrid toolkit inherited from ancient bacteria and the plant cells that engulfed them. Understanding this division process could eventually help breeders boost crop yield and stress tolerance.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Plant organelle division orchestrated by the mosaic machinery of endosymbiotic relics and eukaryotic host factors.
Plastids retain the imprint of their cyanobacterial ancestry by dividing primarily through binary fission. This process is executed by elaborate division machinery that has continued to evolve sinc...
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