Abstract
Cardiolipin (CL) is widely distributed in various prokaryotes and mitochondria of eukaryotes as a membrane phospholipid. We identified the Arabidopsis gene CLS for a CL synthase as the first gene from the multicellular eukaryotic organisms and isolated mutants in which the CLS gene is disrupted by T-DNA insertion. In the mutants, development of embryos was delayed and the mutant cells had mitochondria with abnormal morphology. In vivo labelling experiments of seedlings with [33P] Pi revealed that the incorporation of radioactivity into CL in the total phospholipids was higher in the wild-type plants than in the mutant plants. Fatty-acid composition and molecular species of CL from the wild-type and mutants of Arabidopsis and other plants were also analyzed by GC and MALDI-TOF-MS. Based on the obtained results roles of CL in plants will be discussed.
