The Isolation of Intact Chloroplasts

The isolation of intact chloroplasts from plant tissue allows the study of processes carried out in this subcellular compartment. Such processes may be enzymatic, e.g., photosynthetic oxygen-evolution, or mechanistic, like the import and targeting of precursor proteins synthesized in the cytosol. The latter is important in the case of the plant molecular biologist wishing to study the subcellular localization of a given protein.