Dynamin: The endosymbiosis ring of power?

摘要

One thing plant cells can't afford to get wrong is chloro-plast division. The successful splitting and passing on of chloroplasts to daughter cells is vital to plant cell survival. Indeed, plants (and their progenitors the green algae) have been dividing and passing down their endosymbiotic chloroplasts successfully from generation to generation since the establishment of the chloroplast many hundred of millions of years ago. Three new papers now open a new chapter in our understanding of this division. In this issue of PNAS, Hongbo Gao and colleagues from Katherine Osteryoung's laboratory describe a plant dynamin with a pivotal role in chloroplast division. Dyamins are mechanochemical proteins with a range of roles including the pinching off of vesicles. Previous work, much of it also from the lab of Osteryoung, had already demonstrated that chloroplasts retain a lot of the division machinery they originally possessed as free-living cyanobacteria.