TY - JOUR T1 - Biogenesis of a mitochondrial DNA inheritance machinery in the mitochondrial outer membrane JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/190751 SP - 190751 AU - Sandro Käser AU - Mathilde Willemin AU - Felix Schnarwiler AU - Bernd Schimanski AU - Daniel Poveda-Huertes AU - Silke Oeljeklaus AU - Bettina Warscheid AU - Chris Meisinger AU - André Schneider Y1 - 2017/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/09/19/190751.abstract N2 - Mitochondria cannot form de novo but require mechanisms that mediate their inheritance to daughter cells. The parasitic protozoan Trypanosoma brucei has a single mitochondrion with a single-unit genome that is physically connected across the mitochondrial membranes to the basal body of the flagellum. This connection, termed tripartite attachment complex (TAC), is essential for the segregation of the replicated mitochondrial genomes prior to cytokinesis. Here we identify a protein complex consisting of three integral mitochondrial outer membrane proteins - TAC60, TAC42 and TAC40 - which are essential subunits of the TAC. TAC60 contains separable mitochondrial import and TAC-sorting signals and its biogenesis depends on the main outer membrane protein translocase. TAC40 is a member of the mitochondrial porin family, whereas TAC42 represents a novel class of mitochondrial outer membrane β-barrel proteins. Consequently TAC40 and TAC42 contain C-terminal β-signals. Thus in trypanosomes the highly conserved β-barrel protein assembly machinery plays a major role in the biogenesis of its unique mitochondrial genome segregation system. ER -