Cross-Talk of Mitochondria and Chloroplasts

Abstract

Mitochondria represent a key organelle in plant cells being involved in many aspects of the plant life: normal cell metabolism, stress response and programmed cell death regulation. In the last 40 years there have been many contributions to understanding those aspects of mitochondrial function in plants, but the availability of genome sequencing data and the development of GFP-based technologies have provided enormous improvements to these studies. Besides the speci fi c molecular composition of the electron transport chain and the pattern of enzymatic pathways that distinguish plant from animal mitochondria, the presence of chloroplasts, with which they interact, contributes to the uniqueness of plant mitochondria and their evolution in the plant eukaryotic cell. Chloroplasts and mitochondria are traditionally considered to be autonomous organelles but they are not as independent as they were once thought to be. Here we will focus on the evidence that contributes to de fi ne the metabolic, functional and physical inter-connections between mitochondria and chloroplasts.