Photosynthetically active chloroplasts reting high rates of fatty acid synthesis from i1-"4Clacetate were purifie from leaves of both 16:3 (Solaum nodiforuu, Chenopodiwm album) and 183 plants (Amaranthu lividus, Pisum sativum). A comparson of lipids into which newly synthesized fatty acids were incorporated revealed that, in 183 chloroplasts, enzymic activities catalyzing the conversion of phosphatidate to diacylglycerol and of diacyiglycerol to monogalactosyl diacylglycerol (MGD) were significantiy less active than in 16:3 chloroplasts. In contrast, labeling rates of MGD from UDP-I14Cigal were similar for both types of chloroplasts. having two linoleoyl groups results in an accordingly unsaturated MGD. The MGD-linked acyl groups are substrates for the introduction of the third double bonds (16) to yield MGD with two linolenoyl residues. This galactolipid is characteristic of 18:3 plants such as Asteraceae and Fabaceae, for example (9). It is called eucaryotic MGD, because the nucleocytoplasmic part of the cell controls the construction of the DAG backbone which carries C 18 fatty acids at both C-1 and C-2 positions of glycerol (7), whereas C 16:0, if present, is excluded from C-2.In photosynthetically active cells of 16:3 plants which are represented, for example, by members of Apiaceae and Brassicaceae (9), two pathways operate in parallel (18) to provide thylakoids with MGD. The cooperative 'eucaryotic' sequence (4) is supplemented to various extents by a 'procaryotic' pathway. Its reactions are confined to the chloroplast and result in a typical arrangement of acyl groups as well as their complete desaturation once they are esterified to MGD. Procaryotic DAG backbones carry C 16:0 and its desaturation products at C-2 (7) from which position C18: fatty acids are excluded. The C-l position is occupied by C 18 fatty acids and to a small extent by C16 groups. The similarity in DAG backbones of lipids from blue-green algae (22, 30) with those synthesized by the chloroplast-confmed pathway in 16:3 plants suggests a phylogenetic relation and justifies the term procaryotic.The different pathways just mentioned were deduced from labeling experiments with leaves from a small selection of 18:3 and 16:3 plants (17,24,26,29), whereas studies with isolated chloroplasts were mainly confined to organelles from the 16:3 plant spinach (14,20). To provide additional evidence for the roles ascribed to chloroplasts in pro-or eucaryotic pathways during MGD biosynthesis in different plants, we carried out experiments with chloroplasts isolated from 18:3 as well as 16:3 plants. Our data suggest that chloroplasts from these two groups of plants have similarities and differences in enzymic equipment explaining some of the above mentioned complications in lipid biosynthesis. Chloroplast Isolation. The medium (12) used for isolating chloroplasts, forming gradients, measuring O2 evolution and lipid synthesis contained 25 mm Hepes, 10 mm KHCO3, 2 mm EDTA, 1 mM MgCl2, 1 mm MnCl2, 0.3 mm KH2PO4, and 0.33 M sorbitol, adjusted to ...