Plant chloroplasts originate from the symbiotic relationship between ancient free-living cyanobacteria and ancestral eukaryotic cells. Since the discovery of the bacterial derivative FtsZ gene-which encodes a tubulin homolog responsible for the formation of the chloroplast inner division ring (Z ring)-in the Arabidopsis genome in 1995, many components of the chloroplast division machinery were successively identified. The knowledge of these components continues to expand; however, the mode of action of the chloroplast dividing system remains unknown (compared to bacterial cell division), owing to the complexities faced in in planta analyses. To date, yeast and bacterial heterologous expression systems have been developed for the reconstitution of Z ring-like structures formed by chloroplast FtsZ. In this review, we especially focus on recent progress of our bacterial system using the model bacterium Escherichia coli to dissect and understand the chloroplast division machinery-an evolutionary hybrid structure composed of both bacterial (inner) and host-derived (outer) components.
Keywords: ARC3; ARC6; AtFtsZ1; AtFtsZ2; E. coli; Z ring; chloroplast division; heterologous expression; membrane-tethering.