Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Kiessling, Justine
• Kruse, Sven
• Rensing, Stefan A.
• Harter, Klaus
• Decker, Eva L.
• Reski, Ralf

Titel

Visualization of a Cytoskeleton-like FtsZ Network in Chloroplasts

Ist Teil von

• The Journal of cell biology, 2000-11, Vol.151 (4), p.945-950

Ort / Verlag

United States: Rockefeller University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2000

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Free E-Journal (出版社公開部分のみ）

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• It has been a long-standing dogma in life sciences that only eukaryotic organisms possess a cytoskeleton. Recently, this belief was questioned by the finding that the bacterial cell division protein FtsZ resembles tubulin in sequence and structure and, thus, may be the progenitor of this major eukaryotic cytoskeletal element. Here, we report two nuclear-encoded plant ftsZ genes which are highly conserved in coding sequence and intron structure. Both their encoded proteins are imported into plastids and there, like in bacteria, they act on the division process in a dose-dependent manner. Whereas in bacteria FtsZ only transiently polymerizes to a ring-like structure, in chloroplasts we identified persistent, highly organized filamentous scaffolds that are most likely involved in the maintenance of plastid integrity and in plastid division. As these networks resemble the eukaryotic cytoskeleton in form and function, we suggest the term "plastoskeleton" for this newly described subcellular structure.