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Probing Precursor Interactions With The Chloroplast Import Apparatus, Sarah Jean Wright

Masters Theses

The majority of plastid proteins are nuclear-encoded and imported post-translationally. A cleavable N-terminal extension, the transit peptide, targets these preproteins to the plastid. Transit peptides show very little primary sequence homology, yet are able to direct the precursor protein to interact with the protein components of the translocation complexes located within the inner and outer membranes of the chloroplast. In this study, a semi-conserved motif of the transit peptide, (F/W)(P/G)h(R/K) has been targeted for deletion in order to probe its importance. Two corresponding regions were deleted in the transit peptide of the precursor to the small subunit of Rubisco (prSSU) …