Abstract
Chloroplasts have their own genome and gene expression system, and the chloroplast gene expression is thought to be mainly regulated at the translational level. Many researchers tried to produce useful proteins in chloroplasts, and in some cases, they failed to express the foreign genes due to less translation efficiency. We found that modification of the protein coding region derived from a mammal virus gene that has not been translated in chloroplasts, turns to be translated. This observation suggests that the translation of chloroplast mRNAs is dependent on not only the 5' untranslated region but also the protein coding region. Here, we analyzed the effect of the coding region of chloroplast mRNAs on their translation efficiencies using our chloroplast in vitro translation system.
