Morphogenesis of mitochondrial nucleoids

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Summary: Mitochondrial DNA molecules are folded together by means of the binding of specific proteins to form a mitochondrial nucleoid(mt-nucleoid). In this study, the mt-nucleoid proteins in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae were investigated. One of the major proteins in the isolated mt-nucleoids is Abf2p, a DNA-binding protein that belongs to HMG protein family. In order to identify the protein components specific for the mt-nucleoids, mt-nucleoid proteins were analyzed by means of two-dimensional gel electrophoresis. N-terminal amino acid sequence and immunological evidence showed that α-ketoglutarate dehydrogenase complex is associated with the isolated mt-nucleoids. It was also shown that a 22-kDa protein specific for mt-nucleoids is an unidentified protein encoded by ORF YGL068w. In this study, we identified 16 mt-nucleoid proteins. Our results suggested that the mt-nucleoids are three-dimensionally organized by the association of mtDNA with a specific subset of mitochondrial proteins including matrix enzymes, inner membrane proteins, ribosomal proteins and Abf2p.