期刊名称:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN:0027-8424
电子版ISSN:1091-6490
出版年度:2012
卷号:109
期号:46
页码:18879-18884
DOI:10.1073/pnas.1212270109
语种:English
出版社:The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要:Chloroplasts originate through the endosymbiotic integration of a host and a photosynthetic symbiont, with processes established within the host for the biogenesis and maintenance of the nascent chloroplast. It is thought that several photosynthetic eukaryotes have replaced their original chloroplasts with others derived from different source organisms in a process termed "serial endosymbiosis of chloroplasts." However, it is not known whether replacement chloroplasts are affected by the biogenesis and maintenance pathways established to support their predecessors. Here, we investigate whether pathways established during a previous chloroplast symbiosis function in the replacement chloroplasts of the dinoflagellate alga Karenia mikimotoi. We show that chloroplast transcripts in K. mikimotoi are subject to 3' polyuridylylation and extensive sequence editing. We confirm that these processes do not occur in free-living relatives of the replacement chloroplast lineage, but are otherwise found only in the ancestral, red algal-derived chloroplasts of dinoflagellates and their closest relatives. This indicates that these unusual RNA-processing pathways have been retained from the original symbiont lineage and made use of by the replacement chloroplast. Our results constitute an addition to current theories of chloroplast evolution in which chloroplast biogenesis may be radically remodeled by pathways remaining from previous symbioses.