Engineering the Chloroplast Encoded Proteins of Chlamydomonas

Over a decade ago (1988), John Boynton and colleagues successfully transformed the chloroplast genome of chlamydomonas for the first time by complementation of a chloroplast deletion mutant. Since the first demonstration of chloroplast transformation the function and structure of many chloroplast encoded subunits of the photosynthetic apparatus has been characterized by site-directed mutagenesis. With the completion of the sequencing of the Chlamydomonas chloroplast genome the genetic tools are now in hand to characterize structure-function relationships for each of the chloroplast-encoded proteins of the photosynthetic apparatus.