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Chloroplasts are organelles, specialized subunits, in plant and algal cells. Their discovery inside plant cells is usually credited to Julius von Sachs (1832–1897), an influential botanist and author of standard botanical textbooks – sometimes called "The Father of Plant Physiology". Chloroplasts' main role is to conduct photosynthesis, where the photosynthetic pigment chlorophyll captures the energy from sunlight and converts it and stores it in the energy-storage molecules ATP and NADPH while freeing oxygen from water. They then use the ATP and NADPH to make organic molecules from carbon dioxide in a process known as the Calvin cycle. Chloroplasts carry out a number of other functions, including fatty acid synthesis, much amino acid synthesis, and the immune response in plants. The number of chloroplasts per cell varies from 1 in algae up to 100 in plants like Arabidopsis and wheat.〔(【引用サイトリンク】How large are chloroplasts? )〕 A chloroplast is one of three types of plastids, characterized by its high concentration of chlorophyll, the other two types, the leucoplast and the chromoplast, contain little chlorophyll and do not carry out photosynthesis. Chloroplasts are highly dynamic—they circulate and are moved around within plant cells, and occasionally pinch in two to reproduce. Their behavior is strongly influenced by environmental factors like light color and intensity. Chloroplasts, like mitochondria, contain their own DNA, which is thought to be inherited from their ancestor—a photosynthetic cyanobacterium that was engulfed by an early eukaryotic cell. Chloroplasts cannot be made by the plant cell and must be inherited by each daughter cell during cell division. With one exception (the amoeboid ''Paulinella chromatophora''), all chloroplasts can probably be traced back to a single endosymbiotic event, when a cyanobacterium was engulfed by the eukaryote. Despite this, chloroplasts can be found in an extremely wide set of organisms, some not even directly related to each other—a consequence of many secondary and even tertiary endosymbiotic events. The word ''chloroplast'' ((ギリシア語:χλωροπλάστης)) is derived from the Greek words ''chloros'' (χλωρός), which means green, and ''plastes'' (πλάστης), which means "the one who forms".〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=chloroplast&allowed_in_frame=0 )〕 == Chloroplast lineages and evolution == Chloroplasts are one of many types of organelles in the plant cell. They are considered to have originated from cyanobacteria through endosymbiosis—when a eukaryotic cell engulfed a photosynthesizing cyanobacterium that became a permanent resident in the cell. Mitochondria are thought to have come from a similar event, where an aerobic prokaryote was engulfed.〔 This origin of chloroplasts was first suggested by the Russian biologist Konstantin Mereschkowski in 1905 after Andreas Schimper observed in 1883 that chloroplasts closely resemble cyanobacteria. Chloroplasts are only found in plants and algae. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「chloroplast」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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