Complex I (NADH:ubiquinone oxidoreductase) is central to cellular NAD + recycling and accounts for approximately 40% of mitochondrial ATP production. To understand how complex I function impacts respiration and plant development, we isolated Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) lines that lack complex I activity due to the absence of the catalytic subunit NDUFV1 (for NADH:ubiquinone oxidoreductase flavoprotein1) and compared these plants with ndufs4 (for NADH:ubiquinone oxidoreductase Fe-S protein4) mutants possessing trace amounts of complex I. Unlike ndufs4 plants, ndufv1 lines were largely unable to establish seedlings in the absence of externally supplied sucrose. Measurements of mitochondrial respiration and ATP synthesis revealed that compared with ndufv1, the complex I amounts retained by ndufs4 did not increase mitochondrial respiration and oxidative phosphorylation capacities. No major differences were seen in the mitochondrial proteomes, cellular metabolomes, or transcriptomes between ndufv1 and ndufs4. The analysis of fluxes through the respiratory pathway revealed that in ndufv1, fluxes through glycolysis and the tricarboxylic acid cycle were dramatically increased compared with ndufs4, which showed near wild-type-like fluxes. This indicates that the strong growth defects seen for plants lacking complex I originate from a switch in the metabolic mode of mitochondria and an up-regulation of respiratory fluxes. Partial reversion of these phenotypes when traces of active complex I are present suggests that complex I is essential for plant development and likely acts as a negative regulator of respiratory fluxes.In most eukaryotic organisms, energy is mainly provided by cellular respiration, which is composed of three main pathways. Glycolysis in the cytosol, and additionally in the plastids of plants, degrades sugars into pyruvate. The tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle, which largely resides in the mitochondrial matrix, further dissimilates pyruvate into CO 2 . These two pathways generate reduced cofactors, mostly NADH. The oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) system couples cofactor recycling with ATP production. The electron transfer chain (ETC) located in the mitochondrial inner membrane (IM) uses the redox energy of the reduced cofactors to create an electrochemical gradient across the IM. This gradient is then used by the ATP synthase to convert ADP to ATP, which is subsequently exported from the mitochondria to fuel cellular metabolism and sustain housekeeping functions and growth.The ETC is composed of four large multiprotein complexes. The first of these complexes is the NADHubiquinone oxidoreductase, also called complex I. It plays a crucial role in recycling NAD + for the TCA cycle, and its activity is responsible for about 40% of the total proton pumping across the IM (Wikström, 1984;Galkin et al., 2006). In plants, additional NADH dehydrogenases located on both sides of the IM are present (for review, see Rasmusson et al., 2008). These enzymes can recycle NAD + for use in glycolysis and the TCA cyc...