Study on the regulation of plastid division by a quantitative method

一般来说，叶绿体通过二元裂变增殖，因此在单个植物细胞内叶绿体的形态是一致的。相反，非绿色（非光合作用）质体的形态是相当不固定和异质的，其分子基础目前尚不清楚。在这项研究中，我获得了两个具有非绿色质体形态异常的拟南芥突变体，并鉴定了这两个突变体的候选负责基因。一个已知的叶绿体分裂基因被发现是导致一个突变的原因，而一个功能未知的基因可能是导致另一个突变的原因。综上所述，这些结果表明非绿色质体的形态既受叶绿体分裂基因的控制，也受非绿色质体特异性基因的控制。

Generally, chloroplasts proliferate by binary fission so that morphology of chloroplasts is uniform within a single plant cell. To the contrary, morphology of non-green (non-photosynthetic) plastids is quite amorphic and heterogeneous, whose molecular basis is currently unknown. In this study, I obtained two Arabidopsis mutants which have aberrant morphology of non-green plastids and identified the candidates of the responsible genes for both mutants. A known gene for chloroplast division was found to be responsible for one mutant, whereas a function-unknown gene was likely to be responsible for another mutant. Taken together, these results suggest that morphology of non-green plastids is controlled both by chloroplast division genes and by non-green plastid-specific genes.