Targeting specificity of nuclear-encoded organelle proteins with a self-assembling split-fluorescent protein toolkit

A large number of nuclear-encoded proteins are targeted to the organelles of endosymbiotic origin, namely mitochondria and plastids. To determine the targeting specificity of these proteins, fluorescent protein tagging is a popular approach. However, ectopic expression of fluorescent protein fusions commonly results in considerable background signals and often suffers from the large size and robust folding of the reporter protein, which may perturb membrane transport. Among the alternative approaches that have been developed in recent years, the self-assembling split-fluorescent protein (sasplit-FP) technology appears particularly promising to analyze protein targeting specificity in vivo Here, we improved the sensitivity of this technology and systematically evaluated its utilization to determine protein targeting to plastids and mitochondria. Furthermore, to facilitate high-throughput screening of candidate proteins we developed a Golden Gate-based vector toolkit (PlaMinGo). As a result of these improvements, dual targeting could be detected for a number of proteins that had earlier been characterized as being targeted to a single organelle only. These results were independently confirmed with a plant phenotype complementation approach based on the immutans mutant.This article has an associated First Person interview with the first author of the paper.