Quantitative analysis of chloroplast protein targeting
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Abstract
This thesis presents the first use of the Partition of Unity Method in quantifying
the spatio-temporal dynamics of a fluorescent protein targeted to
the chloroplast twin-arginine translocation pathway.
The fluorescence loss in photobleaching technique is applied in a modified
fashion to the measurement of substrate mobilities in the chloroplast
stroma. Our in vivo results address the two suggested protein targeting
mechanisms of membrane-binding before lateral movement to the translocon
and direct binding to the translocon.
A high performance computing C/C++ implementation of the Partition
of Unity Method is used to perform simulations of fluoresence loss
in photobleaching and allow a compelling comparison to photobleaching
data series. The implementation is both mesh-free and particle-less