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Updated: Mar 26, 2026

Measurement of Protein Import Capacity of Skeletal Muscle Mitochondria
Published on: January 7, 2022
Protein import complexes in the mitochondrial outer membrane of Amoebozoa representatives
Dorota Buczek1,2, Małgorzata Wojtkowska3, Yutaka Suzuki4
1Institute of Bioinformatics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Muenster, Niels Stensen Strasse 14, 48149, Muenster, Germany. dorotabuczek81@gmail.com.
Background:
An ancestral trait of eukaryotic cells is the presence of mitochondria as an essential element for function and survival. Proper functioning of mitochondria depends on the import of nearly all proteins that is performed by complexes located in both mitochondrial membranes. The complexes have been proposed to contain subunits formed by proteins common to all eukaryotes and additional subunits regarded as lineage specific. Since Amoebozoa is poorly sampled for the complexes we investigated the outer membrane complexes, namely TOM, TOB/SAM and ERMES complexes, using available genome and transcriptome sequences, including transcriptomes assembled by us.
Results:
The results indicate differences in the organization of the Amoebozoa TOM, TOB/SAM and ERMES complexes, with the TOM complex appearing to be the most diverse. This is reflected by differences in the number of involved subunits and in similarities to the cognate proteins of representatives from different supergroups of eukaryotes.
Conclusions:
The obtained results clearly demonstrate structural variability/diversity of these complexes in the Amoebozoa lineage and the reduction of their complexity as compared with the same complexes of model organisms.
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