Abstract
Chloroplast transcripts are generally processed by complex reactions including RNA cleavage, RNA splicing, RNA editing, trimming to produce mature mRNAs. The 5 untranslated regions of chloroplast mRNAs are some dozens to several hundreds in nucleotide length. Chloroplasts include usually processed and unprocessed mRNA species. As it is difficult to investigate effects of 5 processing on translation in vivo, we used our in vitro translation system. Translation reactions were performed under template limiting and linearly progressing conditions. We here used atpI and psaC mRNAs from tobacco chloroplasts. The atpI mRNA is transcribed from -208 and from -131, and processed at -85. Both the unprocessed mRNAs were translated in similar efficiency while the processed mRNA was translated very efficiently. The psaC mRNA is transcribed from -234 and processed at -173. The processed mRNA was also translated more efficiently than the unprocessed mRNA.
