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Protein sorting to mitochondria: evolutionary conservations of folding and assembly
1Institute of Physiological Chemistry, University of Munich, Federal Republic of Germany.
Science (New York, N.Y.)
|February 23, 1990
Abstract:
According to the endosymbiont hypothesis, mitochondria have lost the autonomy of their prokaryotic ancestors. They have to import most of their proteins from the cytosol because the mitochondrial genome codes for only a small percentage of the polypeptides that reside in the organelle. Recent findings show that the sorting of proteins into the mitochondrial subcompartments and their folding and assembly follow principles already developed in prokaryotes. The components involved may have structural and functional equivalents in bacteria.