A pentatricopeptide repeat protein is essential for RNA editing in chloroplasts

RNA editing is a process of RNA maturation involved in the insertion, deletion or modification of nucleotides(1). In organellar transcripts of higher plants, specific cytidine residues are converted into uridine residues. In many cases, editing results in the restoration of conserved amino acid residues, a process that is essential for protein function in plastids(2,3). Despite the technical breakthrough in establishing systems in vivo(4) and in vitro(5) for analysing RNA editing, its machinery still remains to be identified in higher plants. Here we introduce a genetic approach and report the discovery of a gene responsible for the specific RNA editing event in the chloroplast.