Chloroplast division in spinach leaves examined by scanning electron microscopy and freeze-etching.

Spinach leaf disks were cultured for 5 days in low-intensity green light and then were transferred to high-intensity white light. Harvests over the next 16 h established that cell area increased by about 80% and chloroplast number per cell increased by about 65%, while the percentage of dumbbell-shaped chloroplasts per cell decreased by 65%. Freeze-etch replicas of fixed and unfixed leaf disks, as well as scanning electron-microscope preparations of fixed material, contained dumbbell-shaped chloroplasts constricted to various degrees. Freeze-etch replicas of unfixed cells from young leaf bases, in which the number of chloroplasts per cell is known to be rapidly increasing, also contained many constricted chloroplasts. It is concluded that dumbbell-shaped chloroplasts occur in vivo and represent a stage in the division of chloroplasts.