Mitochondrial Proteomics of a Secondary Green Alga.

Euglena gracilis is an alga that derives from a secondary endosymbiosis with a green alga. Our general objective is to study the interactions established between the chloroplast and the mitochondrion during the endosymbiosic event and to determine the phylogenetic origin of the genes encoding the proteins involved in these interactions. As a first step, we performed a high-throughput analysis of the mitochondrial proteome of Euglena gracilis. Our MS/MS experiments mostly recover mitochondrial proteins representing 15 mitochondrial pathways, which indicates that our mitochondrial extracts are relatively pure, but the phylogenetic origins of the corresponding genes are surprisingly diverse.