Abstract
In higher plants, glyoxysomes and leaf peroxisomes are present in etiolated and green cotyledons, respectively. Peroxisomes are directly transformed from glyoxysomes to leaf peroxisomes in greening cotyledons of fatty seedlings.
It is deduced from the genome search that 281 genes for proteins with peroxisomal targeting signals (PTS1 and PTS2) or proteins related to the functions of peroxisomes are present in the Arabidopsis genome. Since only a few genes were identified functionally among them, there seem to be many functionally unknown peroxisomal proteins in cotyledons of Arabidopsis. In addition to the proteomic analysis of leaf peroxisomal proteins, we report here a method of isolating glyoxysomes from cotyledons of Arabidopsis in high purity and the proteomic analysis of glyoxysomal proteins. We identified 19 proteins including 13 novel glyoxysomal proteins by MALDI-TOF MS. We will discuss on the peroxisomal transformation of glyoxysomes to leaf peroxisomes by the proteomic analysis.
