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Just follow the acid chain

Nature volume 388, pages 121–122 (1997)Cite this article

Mitochondria have to import almost all of the proteins they need for their function as the cell's energy producers. A combination of biochemistry and genetics now reveals a tiny but crucial cogwheel in the import machinery.

A typical eukaryotic cell contains roughly 10,000 different proteins. About ten per cent of these are in the mitochondria — the double-walled organelles in which respiration occurs. Because mitochondria synthesize only about a dozen proteins, they must import 99 per cent of their proteins from the cytoplasm. But how do they recognize these proteins, and how are they transported across the two membrane barriers? On page 195 of this issue, Dietmeier et al.1 describe a yeast mitochondrial protein that seems to work in both processes and thereby links them. This protein, which they call Tom5, is an integral protein of the mitochondrial outer membrane, and it is so small that it would be missed by most commonly used analytical methods.

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Figure 1: Dietmeier et al.1 have identified Tom5, a small protein that plays a crucial part in a ‘binding relay’ (black arrows) for the import of proteins into mitochondria.

References

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  1. Gottfried Schatz is in the Biozentrum der Universität Basel, Klingbergstrasse 70, CH-4056, Basel, Switzerland

    Gottfried Schatz

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  1. Gottfried Schatz
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Schatz, G. Just follow the acid chain. Nature 388, 121–122 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1038/40510

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