Overview

As the site of photosynthesis, the chloroplast is the defining organelle of green plants and
may be thought of as the world's life-support system.The conversion of carbon dioxide and water to oxygen and carbohydrate by chloroplasts results in a global biomass production of about 60x10¹⁵g C/year (Schlesinger, 1997). However, the plastid is far more versatile in its forms and functions than simply being the "green machine" of carbon fixation. Diverse plastid subtypes such as amyloplasts, chromoplasts, and leucoplasts have specialized and distinct metabolic functions, and represent the dominant plastid species in most plant-based foods, e.g., fruits or storage organs. Plastids are present in virtually all plant cells, irrespective of whether they are photosynthetically competent, and these organelles participate in a diverse array of biosynthetic processes. As metabolic centers, they are crucial to the production of a huge number of biomolecular products and intermediates that are of great importance to human nutrition and health. These run the gamut from fatty acids, amino acids and carbohydrates to vitamins, alkaloids, terpenoids and phenolics and beyond. Thus, the plastid is directly responsible for producing all the biomass of a plant, as well as most of the compounds that make plants valuable to humans.

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Overview of informatic approaches to protein annotation

Overview of phenotypic assays