A set of at least 30 proteins disappears from the two-dimensional electrophoretic pattern of human lymphoid cells treated with various antimitochondrial agents. This set is similar to the set of proteins found in isolated mitochondria (except for the presence of action in the latter group), indicating that the inhibitor effect stops production of a majority of mature mitochondrial proteins. Several proteins having the characteristics of precursors to the major cytoplasmically synthesized mitochondrial proteins can be observed in cells during fast-pulse experiments and in a reticulocyte lysate system fed with total lymphoid cell RNA. In the three major instances of mitochondrial precursor--product processing, the removed peptide is quite basic in each case, suggesting that a lysine- or arginine-rich terminal sequence may be necessary for initial recognition by the mitochondrial protein uptake apparatus. The inhibitor effect allows easy identification of a large set of mitochondrial proteins in two-dimensional maps of various cells, thereby specifying a particularly tractable and functionally distinctive subset of the cellular proteins. The nature and wide scope of the effect support the concept of energy-dependent "vectorial processing" [Schatz, G. (1979) FEBS Lett. 103, 203--211] and indicate that such a mechanism is generally applicable to the major class of cytoplasmically synthesized mitochondrial proteins in mammalian cells.