Ohio Plant Biotechnology Consortium
Research Grant
05/01/07 - 04/31/2008
CO-PI: Patrice Hamel
Coiled-Coil Proteins in Organelle Biogenesis

Abstract:
Cytoskeletal elements have long been thought to be a distinguishing feature of eukaryotes. Recently, proteins similar to all three classes of cytoskeleton – actin, tubulin, and intermediate filaments – were discovered in prokaryotes. We are asking if such elements also exist in plant organelles – derived from prokaryotes - and how they contribute to organelle function. Preliminary data indicate that intermediate filament-like proteins (long coiled-coil proteins) exist in rice and Arabidopsis plastids and mitochondria and we already characterized one Arabidospis plastid coiled-coil protein. Using computational methods,we identified additional 14 candidates, out of which at least three correspond to essential genes. We propose here to (1) verify plastid or mitochondrial location of all 14 proteins and (2) to identify knockout mutants in Arabidopsis for all 14 proteins to gain first insight into their biological role. We will work on the identification of Chlamydomonas homologs with the goal to carry out functional studies of those proteins essential (and therefore difficult to study) in vascular plants.