Abstract
In the past years, research on the flagellate unicellular alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii has entered a new era based on the availability of its complete genome. Since this green alga can be grown relatively easy in a short time‐range, sufficient biological material is available to efficiently establish biochemical purification procedures of sub‐cellular fractions. Combined with the available genome sequences, this paved the way to perform analysis of specific sub‐proteomes by mass spectrometry. In this review, several approaches that provided comprehensive lists of components of certain sub‐cellular compartments and their biological relevance will be described. These include proteins of chloroplast ribosomes, of flagella, of the eyespot as well as posttranslational and environmentally modified sub‐proteomes. The power of such proteome approaches lies in the identification of novel components and modifications of a given sub‐proteome that have not been discovered before. Information is usually gained at a large scale and is very valuable to further understand biological processes of a given cellular sub‐compartment. But clearly the arduous task has then to be performed to further analyze the function of specific proteins/genes by RNA interference technology, mutant analyses or methods for identifying the protein interaction network within a sub‐proteome. (© 2009 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)