Abstract
The crumpled leaf (crl) of Arabidopsis thaliana shows pleiotropic phenotype. In the crl, cell division planes are distorted in shoot apical meristems, root tips and embryos, and differentiation of some types of cells is impaired. The division of all plastids is also inhibited in the crl mutant. The CRL protein encodes a novel protein that is localized in the outer envelope membrane of chloroplasts. We hypothesis that the CRL protein is involved in the plastid protein import because a GFP protein having a transit peptide is not fully imported into plastids in leaf primordia and root tip cells of the crl mutant. In this study, we demonstrate that a protein complex containing the CRL protein includes the a few precursor forms of plastid-targeted proteins. This results suggested that CRL protein is involved in the protein import into plastid.
