Chloroplast DNA

Chloroplast DNA (cpDNA) is the DNA located in chloroplasts, which are photosynthetic organelles located within the cells of some eukaryotic organisms. Chloroplasts, like other types of plastid, contain a genome separate from that in the cell nucleus. The existence of chloroplast DNA was identified biochemically in 1959,^[1] and confirmed by electron microscopy in 1962.^[2] The discoveries that the chloroplast contains ribosomes^[3] and performs protein synthesis^[4] revealed that the chloroplast is genetically semi-autonomous. The first complete chloroplast genome sequences were published in 1986, Nicotiana tabacum (tobacco) by Sugiura and colleagues and Marchantia polymorpha (liverwort) by Ozeki et al.^[5][6] Since then, a great number of chloroplast DNAs from various species have been sequenced.