Functional Analysis of Three Rice Chloroplast Transit Peptides

• Main Authors: Lei He, Guang Chen, Sen Zhang, Zhennan Qiu, Jiang Hu, Dali Zeng, Guangheng Zhang, Guojun Dong, Zhenyu Gao, Deyong Ren, Lan Shen, Longbiao Guo, Qian Qian, Li Zhu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier 2019-01-01
• Series: Rice Science
• Online Access: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1672630818300830
• ISSN: 1672-6308

Chloroplast transit peptides (CTPs) can be used to transport non-chloroplastic proteins into the chloroplasts. Here, we studied the CTPs of three rice (Oryza sativa L.) chloroplast-localized proteins and found that their CTPs could be used to transport non-chloroplast-localized proteins into the chloroplasts. Fusion proteins lacking the CTP remained located in the cytoplasm. Furthermore, we constructed green fluorescent protein fusion vectors with the three CTPs and three non-chloroplast-localized proteins, Ghd10, MULTI-FLORET SPIKELET1 (MFS1), and SHORTENED UPPERMOST INTERNODE 1 (SUI1). After transforming these constructs into rice protoplasts, the fusion proteins all localized in the chloroplasts. Collectively, our results showed that these CTPs can transport non-chloroplast-localized proteins into the chloroplasts, and more importantly, these CTPs can be applied to engineer chloroplast metabolism. Keywords: rice, chloroplast transit peptide, translocated function, subcellular location