What is the size of a chloroplast?

Figure 2: Chloroplasts in the moss Plagiomnium affine, found in old-growth boreal forests in North America, Europe and Asia, growing in moist woodland and turf. The shown lamina cells are elongated, with length of about 80 microns and width of 40 microns. read more

The average chloroplast is about 3 µm (micrometers) in diameter. In one square millimeter of the surface of a leaf, there are about half a million chloroplasts. read more

The modern chloroplast genome, however, is much reduced in size: over the course of evolution, increasing numbers of chloroplast genes have been transferred to the genome in the cell nucleus. As a result, proteins encoded by nuclear DNA have become essential to chloroplast function. read more

Chloroplasts in vascular plants range from being football to lens shaped and as shown in Figure 1, have a characteristic diameter of ≈4-6 microns (BNID 104982, 107012), with a mean volume of ≈20 μm 3 (for corn seedling, BNID 106536). read more