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SRP: adapting to life in the chloroplast

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The signal recognition particle (SRP) has evolved in chloroplasts to include new components, new ways of recognizing targeting substrates and new capabilities that prevent aggregation of protein-targeting substrates or even rescue substrates from an aggregated conformation. Unique attributes of chloroplast SRP are focused toward localizing a single family of nuclear-encoded chlorophyll-binding proteins to thylakoid membranes and suggest that the successful migration of this gene family to the nucleus was tied to evolutionary adaptations in chloroplast SRP.

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Figure 1: Model for post-translational targeting of LHC proteins to the thylakoid membrane by cpSRP.

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Acknowledgements

Work in the author's laboratory is supported by US Department of Energy grant DE-FG02-01ER15161 and US National Center for Research Resources grant P20 RR15569.

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  1. Ralph L. Henry is in the Department of Biological Science, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA.,

    Ralph L Henry

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  1. Ralph L Henry
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Correspondence to Ralph L Henry.

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The author declares no competing financial interests.

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Henry, R. SRP: adapting to life in the chloroplast. Nat Struct Mol Biol 17, 676–677 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nsmb0610-676

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