Organelle Genetics in Plants

Dear Colleagues,

Most of the DNA of eukaryotes is located in the nucleus. However, the chloroplasts in photosynthetic organisms and mitochondria in a vast majority of eukaryotes, also contain part of the genetic material of a eukaryotic cell. The organisation and inheritance patterns of this organellar DNA are quite different to that of nuclear DNA.

The presence of DNA in chloroplasts and mitochondria reveals their evolutionary origin. Considerable phylogenetic evidence supports the hypothesis that both organelles come from ancestral free-living prokaryotes that established an endosymbiotic relationship with a primitive eukaryotic cell. Most genes of the ancestral prokaryotes were transferred to the nucleus of the host cell throughout evolution. Consequently, present-day chloroplast and mitochondrial genomes contain only a few dozen genes, required for ATP synthesis, photosynthesis, and gene expression. Nevertheless, chloroplasts and mitochondria harbour several thousand proteins, of which the vast majority are encoded by the nucleus and are, hence, synthesised in the cytoplasm and subsequently transported to their target organelle. As a result, the expression of nuclear and organelle genomes has to be very precisely coordinated.

This Special Issue encourages the publication of both experimental and review papers principally from a molecular genetics and/or mutational perspective, covering a wide range of topics in chloroplast and plant mitochondria research: replication and dynamics of nucleoids, transcriptional and posttranscriptional regulation of gene expression in organelles, organelle translation, protein import into organelles, retrograde and anterograde signalling pathways, organelle biogenesis and plant development, organelle genome sequencing and databases, organelle evolution and technical advances in organelle biotechnology. Other related topics are also welcome.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Víctor Quesada Pérez
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Pedro Robles
Guest Editors

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