摘要Plant cells contain only small amounts of mi-tochondrial DNA (mtDNA), with the genomic in-formation shared among multiple mitochondria. The biological relevance and molecular mecha-nism underlying this hallmark of plant cells has been unclear. Here, we report that Arabidopsis thaliana plants exhibited significantly reduced growth and mitochondrial dysfunction when the mtDNA copy number was increased to the de-gree that each mitochondrion possessed DNA. The amounts of mitochondrion-encoded tran-scripts increased several fold in the presence of elevated mtDNA levels. However, the efficiency of RNA editing decreased with this excess of mitochondrion-encoded transcripts, resulting in impaired assembly of mitochondrial complexes containing mtDNA-encoded subunits, such as respiratory complexes I and IV. These ob-servations indicate the occurrence of nuclear–mitochondrial incompatibility in the cells with increased amounts of mtDNA and provide an initial answer to the fundamental question of why plant cells have much lower mtDNA levels than animal cells. We propose that keeping mtDNA levels low moderates nuclear–mitochondrial incompatibility and that this may be a crucial factor driving plant cells to restrict the copy numbers of mtDNA.