Chloroplast plays a vital role in plant development and growth. The pentatricopeptide repeat (PPR) gene family is one of the largest gene families in plants. In addition, cold stress affects a broad spectrum of cellular components, e.g. chloroplast, and metabolism in plants. However, the regulatory mechanism for rice PPR genes on chloroplast development still remains elusive under cold stress. In this paper, we characterized a new rice PPR gene mutant tcd10 (thermo-sensitive chlorophyll-deficient mutant 10) that exhibits the albino phenotype, malformed chloroplast and could not survive after the 5-leaf stage when grown at 20 °C, but does the normal phenotype at 32 °C. Map-based cloning, followed by RNA interference and CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing techniques, revealed that TCD10 encoding a novel PPR protein, mainly localized to the chloroplasts, with 27 PPR motifs, is responsible for the mutant phenotype. In addition, TCD10 is specific expression in tissues. The disruption of TCD10 resulted in an evidently reduced expression of chloroplast-associated genes under cold stress (20 °C), whereas they did recovered to normal levels at high temperature (32 °C). These results showed an important role of TCD10 for chloroplast development under cold stress. The TCD10 encodes a novel rice PPR protein, mainly located in chloroplasts, which is important for chloroplast development, growth and the maintenance of photosynthetic electron transport and its disorder would lead to an aberrant chloroplast and abnormal expressions in these genes for chloroplast development and photosynthesis in rice under cold stress.

Plastid ribosomal proteins (PRPs) are essential for ribosome biogenesis, plastid protein biosynthesis, chloroplast differentiation, and early chloroplast development. This study identifies the first rice PRP mutant, asl1 (albino seedling lethality1), which exhibits an albino lethal phenotype at the seedling stage. This albino phenotype was associated with altered chlorophyll (Chl) content and chloroplast development. Map-based cloning revealed that ASL1 encodes PRP S20 (PRPS20), which localizes to the chloroplast. ASL1 showed tissue-specific expression, as it was highly expressed in plumule and young seedlings but expressed at much lower levels in other tissues. In addition, ASL1 expression was regulated by light. The transcript levels of nuclear genes for Chl biosynthesis and chloroplast development were strongly affected in asl1 mutants; transcripts of some plastid genes for photosynthesis were undetectable. Our findings indicate that nuclear-encoded PRPS20 plays an important role in chloroplast development in rice.