Posttranslational Transport and In Thylakoido Integration of Plastid Protein

The techniques described in this chapter have proven useful in the investigation of intracellular protein transport in plants and, in particular, transport of plastid proteins. The method of posttranslational transport, originally elaborated by Chua and Schmidt (1 ) and Highfield and Ellis (2 ) for the transport of the prevalent plastid proteins light-harvesting chlorophyll a/b protein (LHCP) and small subunit of ribulose-1, 5-bisphosphate carboxylase (SSU) into isolated chloroplasts, has helped to determine unequivocally whether the destination of nuclear-coded proteins is the chloroplast. In later studies, the transport protocol was optimized (3 ).