RNase P is an essential enzyme that cleaves the 59 leader sequence of tRNA precursors. RNase Ps were believed until now to occur universally as ribonucleoproteins in organisms performing RNase P activity. Here we find that protein-only RNase P enzymes called PRORP (for proteinaceous RNase P) support RNase P activity in vivo in both organelles and the nucleus in Arabidopsis. Beyond tRNA, PRORP proteins are involved in the maturation of small nucleolar RNA (snoRNA) and mRNA. Finally, ribonucleoprotein RNase MRP is not involved in tRNA maturation in plants. Altogether, our results indicate that ribonucleoprotein enzymes have been entirely replaced by proteins for RNase P activity in plants.Supplemental material is available for this article.Received February 10, 2012; revised version accepted April 5, 2012.RNase P is a virtually universal enzyme involved in the maturation of tRNAs, as it cleaves the 59 leader sequence of tRNA precursors. It is thus essential to obtain functional tRNAs and is therefore pivotal for translation (Lai et al. 2010;Reiter et al. 2010). RNase P activities from all phyla of life were assumed to be universally performed by ribonucleoprotein enzymes whose catalytic activities are held by ribozymes (Altman 2007). This concept was first challenged with the proposition that spinach chloroplast and human mitochondria RNase Ps would not contain any RNA moiety (Wang et al. 1988;Rossmanith and Karwan 1998). More recently, protein-only RNase P enzymes called PRORP (for proteinaceous RNase P) have been characterized at the molecular level in endosymbiotic organelles in both humans and Arabidopsis (Holzmann et al. 2008;Gobert et al. 2010). Still, the dogma remained that RNase P enzymes would nonetheless universally occur as ribonucleoproteins in living organisms performing RNase P activity, with protein-only RNase Ps being marginal exceptions restricted to only some organelles (e.g., Esakova and Krasilnikov 2010).The putative PRORP RNase P enzymes are characterized by the occurrence of a conserved ''NYN'' metallonuclease domain (Anantharaman and Aravind 2006). PRORP proteins also belong to the huge pentatricopeptide repeat (PPR) protein family. These proteins, typically from eukaryotes, are involved in a wide variety of posttranscriptional mechanisms (Schmitz-Linneweber and Small 2008). However, no functional information was available for PRORP proteins. We previously established that Arabidopsis PRORP1, a protein localized in organelles, can act in vitro as an RNase P enzyme that is a single protein (Gobert et al. 2010), although its function remained elusive in planta. We also used localization experiments (YFP fusions and immunodetections) to determine that PRORP2 and PRORP3, two paralogs of PRORP1, were present in Arabidopsis nuclei (Gobert et al. 2010). In addition, the fast-growing amount of genomic data has revealed that some important groups of eukaryotes, such as land plants and kinetoplastids, do not encode any recognizable genes for RNase P RNA or for proteins specific for ribonucleoprotein...