ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology, MCS Building M310, University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley 6009, Western Australia, Australia. seamus@cyllene.uwa.edu.au
Complex machinery has evolved to recognise and import nuclear-encoded proteins into mitochondria. Recent work now shows that the plant Tom20 mitochondrial protein import receptor has a similar tertiary structure to animal Tom20, although the proteins are evolutionarily distinct, representing an elegant example of convergent evolution.