Evidence for base excision repair of oxidative DNA damage in chloroplasts of Arabidopsis thaliana.

Chloroplasts are the sites of photosynthesis in plants, and they contain their own multicopy, requisite genome. Chloroplasts are also major sites for production of reactive oxygen species, which can damage essential components of the chloroplast, including the chloroplast genome. Compared with mitochondria in animals, relatively little is known about the potential to repair oxidative DNA damage in chloroplasts.

Pollen and anther ontogeny in Cabomba caroliniana (Cabombaceae, Nymphaeales).

Cabomba is a small water lily genus that is native to the New World. Studies of pollen development and associated changes in the anther yield valuable characters for considering the evolution of reproductive biology in seed plants. Here we characterized the complete ontogenetic sequence for pollen in Cabomba caroliniana.

Chlamydomonas and Arabidopsis. A dynamic duo.

A translational biology perspective on Chlamydomonas and Arabidopsis might be expected to focus on those genes, cellular components, or biological processes found first in Chlamydomonas and subsequently studied in Arabidopsis. There are indeed many such examples. There are also examples that flow from Arabidopsis to Chlamydomonas in terms of initial discovery and subsequent study.

Photo-oxidative stress in a xanthophyll-deficient mutant of Chlamydomonas.

When there is an imbalance between the light energy absorbed by a photosynthetic organism and that which can be utilized in photosynthesis, photo-oxidative stress can damage pigments, proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids. In this work we compared the wild type and a xanthophyll-deficient mutant of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii in their response to high amounts of light. Wild-type Chlamydomonas cells were able to acclimate to high amounts of light following transfer from low light conditions.