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Exit route evolved into entry path in plants

Chloroplast organelles in plant cells are thought to have evolved from bacterial cells. It emerges that the protein-import system in chloroplasts arose from components that export proteins out of bacteria.
  1. Danny J. Schnell

    1. Danny J. Schnell is in the Department of Plant Biology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824, USA.

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Chloroplasts are subcellular organelles that provide plants with abundant metabolic capabilities, most notably the ability to capture carbon from atmospheric carbon dioxide through the process of photosynthesis. It has been proposed1 that the plant kingdom began to evolve when a bacterium, similar to a present-day photosynthetic cyanobacterium, was engulfed by a host cell, and from this bacterial ancestor, chloroplasts eventually arose in the cellular descendants of the host cell. During chloroplast evolution, thousands of genes transferred from the intracellular bacterial genome to the host genome. However, these relocated genes encode proteins that need to be targeted to their site of function within the chloroplast. Writing in Nature, Chen et al.2 report the identification of a component of the system that imports proteins into chloroplasts. Their finding illuminates how this evolved, and also provides mechanistic insight into how import is co-ordinated across the two membrane layers that form the chloroplast’s outer envelope.

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Nature 564, 45-46 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-07426-6

References

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