research on plants for the understanding of diseases of nuclear and mitochondrial origin研究植物对疾病的核和线粒体起源的理解.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology Volume 2012, Article ID 836196, 12 pages doi:10.1155/2012/836196 Review Article Research on Plants for the Understanding of Diseases of Nuclear and Mitochondrial Origin Claudia P. Spampinato1 and Diego F. Gomez-Casati1, 2 1 Centro de Estudios Fotosinteticos y Bioquımicos (CEFOBI-CONICET), Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Suipacha 531, ´ ´ 2000 Rosario, Argentina 2 Department of Plant Biotechnology, Universidad Nacional de General San Martin (UNSAM), Avenida General Paz 5445, 1650 San Martın, Buenos Aires, Argentina ´ Correspondence should be addressed to Claudia P. Spampinato, spampinato@.ar and Diego F. Gomez-Casati, gomezcasati@.ar Received 17 February 2012; Accepted 28 March 2012 Academic Editor: Marina Clemente Copyright © 2012 C. P. Spampinato and D. F. Gomez-Casati. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Different model organisms, such as Escherichia coli, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Caenorhabditis elegans, Drosophila melanogaster, mouse, cultured human cell lines, among others, were used to study the mechanisms of several human diseases. Since human genes and proteins have been structurally and functionally conserved in plant organisms, the use of plants, especially Arabidopsis thaliana, as a model system to relate molecular defects to clinical disorders has recently increased. Here, we briefly review our current knowledge of human diseases of nuclear and mitochondrial origin and summarize the experimental findi