Figure 1.

Balloon-Like Chloroplasts in vipp1 Mutants.

(A) Phenotypes of seedlings and chloroplasts from Col (wild type), vipp1 mutants (vipp1-kd and vipp1-ko), and their VIPP1-GFP–complemented lines. Top panels show photographs of different 4-week-old lines of Arabidopsis (bars = 1 cm). Bottom panels show chloroplasts from unfixed leaf tissues examined using bright-field microscopy (bars =10 µm). Red arrows indicate balloon-like chloroplasts/plastids.

(B) Ratio of balloon-like to regular chloroplasts/plastid in leaves from different lines of Arabidopsis shown in (A). Plastids were counted in the leaves of at least three individual plants (n = 50, shown with sd).

(C) Immunoblot analysis of leaf extracts from 6-week-old lines of Arabidopsis shown in (A). Loading was normalized by equal protein amount. Top and middle panels, immunoblots cross-reacted with anti-VIPP1 and anti-GFP, respectively. Arrows indicate degradation products (see the text). Bottom panel, Coomassie blue–stained gel (CBB) as a loading control. Molecular markers (M) are shown on the left.

(D) Immunoblot analysis of Percoll-purified chloroplast proteins from 6-week-old lines of Arabidopsis. Immunoblots were performed as shown in (C). vipp1-kd and vipp1-ko were not included in this immunoblot because no intact chloroplasts/plastids were recovered by Percoll gradient.