Proteins in Etioplast and Chloroplast Membranes

Are any or all of the proteins of photosynthetically active chloroplast thylakoids present in etioplasts This comes to the heart of the question of whether these membranes are assembled stepwise. It is the kind of information needed to study membrane development and its control. 

Polypeptide number Nominal molecular weight Prolamellar bodies of etioplasts Plastid membranes after 4 cycles of illumination Thylakoids of chloroplasts Changes during development of thylakoids from prolamellar bodies 

Each cycle consisted of 1 min illumination, followed by 6 h of darkness. 

In the work just described, we examined the development of non-light-requiring, partial reactions of photosynthesis during the maturation of maize thylakoids. The observations can be summarized as follows  

In line with the intentions of this volume, this presentation has dealt almost exclusively with our approach to the study of plastid membrane development. There have been a number of different approaches to the problem, and many of these are referred to in some of our other papers on this subject. Experimental and hypothetical analyses of the problem of the production of chlorophyll and its insertion into the photosynthetic membrane cannot be discussed in detail here, but the problem has been examined by Bogorad et and, more recently, with different experimental tools by Mathis and Sauer.  

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